Size It Up Geography

Countries, US states and lakes as cut-outs, drawn on an equal-area projection so nothing near the poles is inflated. The ruler shows the reference’s span along its longer axis; make the other outline the right size beside it.

Why maps lie to you

The map on the wall is a Mercator projection, and it stretches everything far from the equator. Greenland looks the size of Africa; it is a fourteenth of it. Alaska looks bigger than Mexico; it is not. Size It Up Geography draws every outline on an equal-area projection centred on the place itself, so the shape you see is the shape that exists, and the only thing you have to get right is how big it is.

Every outline comes from Natural Earth, a public-domain map dataset, at a resolution of one to fifty million. Spans are measured on the sphere, not on the page.

A country is drawn as the land people picture when they hear its name. France is the hexagon and Corsica, not the 13,000 km from French Guiana to New Caledonia that its full territory spans; Portugal is the mainland, without the Azores. Lakes are drawn the same way and measured the same way — Lake Superior along its 592 km east–west axis, Lough Neagh across 25 km.

Prefer living things to borders? Size It Up Animals keeps every round inside the animal kingdom.

Explore real proportions in the Size Comparison Game.