The world, in proportion.
Kartavera is an atlas that refuses to lie about size. Every country is drawn at its true area on the Equal Earth projection, with honest numbers beside it, and you can pick any country up and put it anywhere to see how it really compares.
Why it exists
The map most of us grew up with was drawn in 1569 for sailors. Mercator's projection keeps compass bearings straight and pays for it by inflating everything far from the equator: Greenland looks the size of Africa, which is fourteen times larger. Five centuries later that picture is still in classrooms, on news channels and in every navigation app.
Kartavera is a small correction. Equal Earth, published by Šavrič, Patterson and Jenny in 2018, keeps every square kilometre the same size on screen. Move a country anywhere on it and it stays exactly as big as it is.
What you can do here
Slide the map from Mercator to Equal Earth and watch the poles deflate. Pick a country, drag it across the world, compare it with whatever it lands on.
Ten pairs of countries at the same scale, one question: which is larger? The same puzzle for everyone, every day.
A page for every pair of 235 countries: the overlay at true scale, the table, and why your old map disagrees.
Principles
- Honest by construction. Everything drawn is equal-area. Moving a country is a rotation of the sphere, so its area cannot change, not even by accident.
- Numbers you can check. Every figure has a named source and a year. When a source is wrong for our purpose, we say so and pick another.
- Nothing to sign up for. The atlas, the game and every page work without an account, without cookies and without trackers — even the fonts are served from here. Signing in is optional, only to carry your streak across devices.
- Free to use. If Kartavera ever needs to earn its keep, it will be by being useful, not by selling what you do here.
Who is behind it
Kartavera is built and run by Taranetiks, a software company in Belgrade, Serbia. One person there has designed, built and run the project since September 2026. It started with a simple irritation: every map app still uses a projection made for sixteenth-century ships.
- Operator
- Taranetiks, Belgrade, Serbia
- hello@kartavera.com
- Press & partnerships
- Use the form below or write to the address above. Embeds and data exports are coming; ask and we will tell you when.
Data & sources
Dataset built 2026-10-12. Everything below is open data; nothing is scraped from another map site.
| What | Source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| Geometry | Natural Earth, 110m for the world map, 50m for figures | Public domain |
| Names, ISO codes, sovereignty, regions | Natural Earth admin-0 attributes | Public domain |
| Area | Wikidata (conventional land + water totals). Not the World Bank's "surface area", which counts only ice-free land for Greenland | CC0 |
| Population | World Bank, most recent year; Wikidata for territories the Bank omits | CC BY 4.0 / CC0 |
| Capitals | World Bank; Wikidata as fallback | CC BY 4.0 / CC0 |
| Neighbours, coastlines | Derived from the geometry itself | — |
| GNI per capita, GDP, life expectancy, income group | World Bank (GNI by the Atlas method). A figure more than five years older than the latest is left out of the map rather than coloured beside this year's | CC BY 4.0 |
| Urban population, internet, CO₂, forest, fertility; population growth, births, deaths, age, migration, refugees; infant mortality, doctors, university enrolment; GDP per capita (PPP), growth, inflation, unemployment, jobs by sector, investment, exports, military spending, poverty, inequality; renewable energy, electricity, mobile phones, air pollution, protected and arable land, water stress, precipitation; homicides | World Bank World Development Indicators, with the figures the Bank republishes from the UN, the ILO, the IMF, UNHCR, UNODC, SIPRI, the WHO, FAO and others. Most recent value per country; a value more than five years older than the newest is left out (seven for homicides, ten for poverty, inequality and precipitation, where surveys are rare). Migration and refugees are divided by the Bank's population of the same year | CC BY 4.0 |
| Political stability, control of corruption | World Bank, Worldwide Governance Indicators (estimates from about −2.5 to +2.5) | CC BY 4.0 |
| Human Development Index | UNDP Human Development Report Office, composite indices time series | CC BY 3.0 IGO |
| Form of government | CIA World Factbook, final edition (the Factbook has been discontinued). Countries are coloured by constitutional form; the Factbook's own wording is shown beside it, verbatim | Public domain |
| Flags | flag-icons | MIT |
| Cities | Natural Earth 10m populated places; their names in other languages from Natural Earth and Wikidata | Public domain / CC0 |
| City populations (games) | Wikidata (city proper), checked against Natural Earth's metropolitan figure | CC0 / public domain |
| World Heritage sites, highest points | Wikidata: UNESCO World Heritage Site IDs and criteria, each country's highest point and its elevation | CC0 |
| Islands (games) | The largest islands and their areas as commonly published; their names from Wikipedia's language links | CC BY-SA (names) |
| Day and night | Computed in your browser from the time, with the standard solar formulas (declination, equation of time) | — |
| Temperature and weather | MET Norway Locationforecast 2.0, asked by our server for the capitals and largest cities as each forecast expires | CC BY 4.0 |
| Clouds | NOAA GMGSI (Global Mosaic of Geostationary Satellite Imagery), infrared, processed by our server every hour | Public domain |
| Earthquakes | USGS Earthquake Hazards Program real-time feeds, magnitude 2.5 and up, the past day and week; asked by our server every five minutes while the layer is open | Public domain |
| Fires | NASA FIRMS active fire detections (VIIRS on NOAA-20 and Suomi NPP), the past 24 hours; asked by our server at most once an hour and gathered into a grid | NASA open data |
| Flights | ADSB.lol, every aircraft in the air as its network of receivers sees it; asked by our server once a minute while the layer is open. Routes from the route lookup the same maps use; airports from OurAirports | ODbL (ADSB.lol); public domain (OurAirports) |
| Satellites | CelesTrak, the orbital elements of every active satellite (from the US Space Force's public catalogue); asked by our server every eight hours. The positions are worked out in your browser with the SGP4 model | Free to use |
| Rocket launches | Launch Library 2 by The Space Devs, the next thirty launches with their pads; asked by our server every half hour while the layer is open | Free to use, The Space Devs named |
| Asteroids passing Earth | NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics, close-approach data: every known asteroid passing within 0.05 au in the next sixty days; asked every six hours | Public domain |
| Storms & hazards | GDACS (Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System, the United Nations and the European Commission): current tropical cyclones with track, forecast cone and wind field, floods and volcanoes; asked by our server every half hour | Free to use, GDACS named |
| Aurora | NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, the OVATION aurora forecast and the planetary Kp index; asked by our server every ten minutes while the layer is open | Public domain |
| Satellite picture | NASA GIBS (Global Imagery Browse Services), the day's true-colour picture of the Earth from VIIRS on Suomi NPP; fetched by our server once a day, a missing swath filled from the day before | Free to use, NASA named |
| Lights at night | NASA Black Marble, the 2016 composite of the VIIRS day/night band, through NASA GIBS; baked into the site once | Free to use, NASA named |
| Wind | NOAA's Global Forecast System (GFS), the wind ten metres above the ground for the step nearest to now, through the PacIOOS ERDDAP server of the University of Hawaii; asked by our server every three hours | Public domain |
| Waves | NOAA WaveWatch III global wave model, significant wave height and direction for the hour nearest to now, through the PacIOOS ERDDAP server of the University of Hawaii; asked every three hours | Public domain |
| Time zones | Boundaries from timezone-boundary-builder (built from OpenStreetMap); which zones each country uses from the IANA time zone database; offsets and summer time worked out by your browser | ODbL (© OpenStreetMap contributors); tz database public domain |
| Calling codes | Wikidata, country calling code, checked against the ITU list | CC0 |
| Through the years (the time slider) | World Bank World Development Indicators, the same figures year by year from 1960 (or the first year most countries have them); colours are fixed across all the years | CC BY 4.0 |
The Equal Earth projection is free to use. Kosovo, Northern Cyprus and Somaliland are drawn as Natural Earth draws them but have no ISO numeric code, so they carry no figures and no pages. Spotted a wrong number? Tell us below.
Privacy
Kartavera sets one cookie that identifies no one: it holds only whether this visit is in the Android or iPhone app, the installed app or a browser tab, and it ends when you close it. If you sign in, one login cookie keeps you signed in for 90 days. No account is needed to explore or to play. We count visits with Umami, an open-source analytics tool running on our own server: no cookies, no fingerprinting, no personal data, and nothing shared with anyone. Server logs hold IP addresses for up to fourteen days, for abuse protection only. There are no ads and no third-party trackers, and nothing is sold or shared.
If you pick a nickname — to join the leaderboard, keep your progress, duel or send a challenge — we store, under a random player id that lives in your browser (no IP address): the nickname and the country you chose; your daily results and ranks; XP, level, streak, passport stamps and badges; your practice, arcade and weekly plays and the countries you missed, so they can come back for review; your duel and challenge results and duel rating; and your weekly league; and the days you played and whether in the app or a browser, to count how many people come back. Your nickname, country, level, stamps, badges and ranks are shown on your public profile page and on the leaderboards.
If you sign in, we also keep your email address or your Google account id, and nothing else from Google, so the same player can follow you to another device. With a username and password we keep the username and the password only as a one-way hash (scrypt), which nobody can turn back into the password. Sign in with Google loads Google's sign-in script on that page only. If you turn on reminders, we keep the browser's push address, the hour you chose, your time zone offset and the language you use, to send one notification a day and to tell you when a challenge arrives. In the app, challenge notifications use the phone's own push token instead (Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android, Apple's push service on iPhone), kept with your player and language; the app's daily reminder is scheduled on the phone and tells us nothing. If you write to us, we keep your message and address to answer you. If you ask for the weekly email, we use that address to send your week's result once a week, until you turn it off with the link in every email or in Settings.
If you report a player, we keep the report with your player id, the reason and the note you wrote, so we can look into it; the player is not told who reported them. Players you block are kept as a list under your player id. Both are deleted with your player.
The language you choose is remembered in this browser's storage, not in a cookie. A sign-in link is written in the language of the page you asked from, and that language is not stored with your account.
The live layers — weather, clouds, earthquakes and fires — are fetched by our server from MET Norway, NOAA, USGS and NASA; your browser only talks to Kartavera. Your location is never asked for or used: day and night are computed from the clock, and the weather is for fixed cities.
Deleting your data: delete your player and account on the device you play on — everything above goes at once. Without that device, write to hello@kartavera.com with your nickname and country; we delete within 30 days. The Android and iPhone apps are the same website and keep nothing of their own.