Kartavera

The world, in proportion.

Kartavera is an atlas that draws every country at its true size. The map above uses the Equal Earth projection, where a square kilometre in Greenland takes exactly as much screen as one in Congo. Pick any country, drag it anywhere on the world, and compare it with what it lands on. Slide the map back to Mercator to see how much your usual map has been lying.

Popular comparisons

The ten largest countries

  1. Russia17,075,400 km²
  2. Canada9,984,670 km²
  3. United States9,826,675 km²
  4. China9,596,961 km²
  5. Brazil8,515,767 km²
  6. Australia7,692,024 km²
  7. India3,287,263 km²
  8. Argentina2,780,400 km²
  9. Kazakhstan2,724,900 km²
  10. Algeria2,381,741 km²

Why the map you know is wrong

Gerardus Mercator drew his map in 1569 so that a ship's compass course would be a straight line. To do that he had to stretch the world more and more toward the poles. Greenland ends up looking like Africa; in reality Africa is fourteen times larger. The projection was never meant for comparing countries, yet it is the one on nearly every screen.

Equal Earth, published in 2018, keeps areas exact and continents recognisable. Kartavera uses it for the world map, and when you drag a country across the map it rotates the whole sphere underneath, so the country's area cannot change, not even by a pixel. The numbers beside the map come from Natural Earth, Wikidata and the World Bank, each with its year and source.

More about the project, the data and who runs it →

Questions people ask

Is Greenland really smaller than DR Congo?
Yes. Greenland covers about 2.17M km² and the Democratic Republic of the Congo about 2.34M km², so Greenland is 0.92× the size of DR Congo. On a Mercator map Greenland looks larger than the whole of Africa, which is roughly 14× bigger.
Why does Africa look small on most maps?
Most web and classroom maps use the Mercator projection, which stretches areas more and more the further they are from the equator. Africa sits on the equator and is drawn close to its true size; Europe, Russia, Canada and Greenland are inflated several times over, so Africa looks small only by comparison.
What is the Equal Earth projection?
Equal Earth is an equal-area map projection published in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny. Every region on the map has the same area as on the globe, so countries can be compared honestly, while the continents keep familiar shapes.
Is Kartavera free?
Yes. There is nothing to sign up for, no cookies and no trackers. The atlas, the daily game and every country comparison page are free to use.