The short answer
Greenland does not have a larger area than Africa. The familiar impression comes from the Mercator projection, which expands scale as latitude increases. Greenland sits close to the North Pole, while Africa straddles the equator, so their apparent areas are distorted by very different amounts.
What Mercator was designed to do
Mercator is a conformal projection. It preserves local angles, which made straight compass bearings useful for navigation. Keeping those angles on a flat rectangle requires stretching both east–west and north–south scale toward the poles.
That trade-off is not an error in the mathematics. The problem begins when a navigation-oriented projection is treated as a neutral picture of relative area.
What an equal-area map changes
An equal-area projection gives equally sized regions on Earth equal visual area on the map. Equal Earth does this while retaining rounded continents and a broadly familiar world outline. Shapes still change, but a comparison of geographic footprint becomes much more honest.
How EqualAtlas calculates comparisons
EqualAtlas calculates spherical areas from a consistent Natural Earth boundary dataset. The same geometry drives the map and the displayed comparison ratio, avoiding a mismatch between what the reader sees and what the page measures.
Explore the evidence
Sources and further reading
Continue with the Equal Earth projection guide, try the interactive map, or review our methodology.