This Interactive Tool Will Show You Exactly How Incorrect The World Map Is

Maps are cool and fun, and if you disagree I will fight you outside the bike sheds after school. But as that one scene in the West Wing taught us, every 2D rectangular world map you’ve ever seen has a pretty big inaccuracy: the areas close to the poles are always distorted to compensate for having to stretch the globe over a flat surface, meaning that countries like Canada and Russia look substantially bigger than they actually are, and that many parts of the developing world are much larger than they appear.

It’s difficult to wrap your head around what that looks like, because you only ever see the distortion as opposed to the reality. But a new interactive world-map app called The True Size Of lets you move countries around to get a sense of their proper size, with some pretty interesting results.

If you take Australia, for example, and move it to a spot where it gets the same amount of distortion as Russia, our humble continent morphs into a hideous top-heavy creation that longs for release from the immense pain it’s clearly in.

So clearly that distortion effect is pretty significant on countries closest to the poles, which turn out to be much smaller than you’d think.

Greenland, especially, is the geographical equivalent of a really short guy who wears heeled shoes and pinstriped suits to make himself look taller. It always looks like a vast mass of land on maps, but here’s how big it really is, as measured by perching it awkwardly of the east coast of Australia:

Nor is Russia as scarily huge as it appears on most maps. Here it is getting eaten for breakfast by Africa, which is just a stupidly big place:

While Europe is as adorably tiny as ever. Here are various major European nations nestling comfortably inside Australian states like colourful little eggs:

Also, here is the island nation of Nauru superimposed over Australia to give you an idea of how big one of our major refugee resettlement destinations is:

Oh boy! That is not very large, is it? Seems a bit counter-intuitive for a massive country like ours to send people to live in a place maybe twice the size of the Sydney lock-out zone. The More You Know.

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Play with The True Size Of here.