The largest to smallest landmasses in the world mapped
1 min readJul 19, 2020
One of the most significant disadvantages of the Mercator projection is that it distorts the actual sizes of territories.
The Mercator projection exaggerates the sizes of landmasses close to the poles as a side effect. As a result, Russia and Canada seem to take up almost 25 percent of the planet’s surface, but these nations only own 5 percent.
The map below shows the actual size of all countries and dependencies by area.
