· · Africa ·
We all know the issues with taking the earth, an oblate spheroid, and trying to flatten it out onto a piece of paper so we can dump the globes and take maps on our ships.
If a map is on a piece of paper or a computer screen, it has to be projected. This is because the Earth is round and paper and screens are flat. There are a lot of ways that use mathematics to make map projections.
The one we see the most is the Mercator projection
The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection which is widely used in cartography today. It was developed by Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It is not a physical projection, and cannot be constructed using geometric tools. On a small scale, geometric shapes can be moved around the map, without distorting them (this property is known as conformity). As a downside, the scale of the shape and the direction of lines may change when shapes are moved. For example, Africa is actually 15 times larger than Greenland, but on this map projection they look the same size.

Today, Mercator projections are seldom used in atlases or maritime charts but still used for online maps such as Google Maps.

Yup, the map we normally see does its best but totally fucks up the sizes of many places, particularly Greenland (not that bigly at all), and Africa (bigger in reality).
The UN General Assembly has just endorsed a new position on world  maps that aims to represent the relative size of the world's land masses more accurately, with the difference being particularly obvious when you compare Africa and Greenland. The resolution, backed by 164 countries, promotes the use of equal-area projections such as Equal Earth as an alternative to the familiar Mercator projection
[source: Maps Mania: Mercator vs Equal Earth (September 05, 2026)

[Tom] Patterson developed the new projection in 2018 with a California-based software engineer, Bojan Šavrič, the “maths wizard” of the trio, and Bernhard Jenny, an associate professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.



Visual comparison of Equal Earth (blue) and Robinson (red) map projections. Eurasia is aligned for ease of comparison, showing the difference in relative size of Africa and South America.



There's a interactive slidey-slidey version to compare as well - Africa, it was always that big!


Not only was Africa always that big, it is really big!
 

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