A flat map of a round planet always lies somewhere
There is no way to flatten a sphere onto a rectangle without distorting something, whether that is shape, area, distance, or direction. The Mercator projection, drawn by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, keeps shape and angles correct at any point, which is exactly what a compass bearing needs to stay usable on a straight line. That property, called being conformal, made it the standard for nautical charts for centuries and is a large part of why it still underlies most web maps today, including the ones behind turn by turn navigation.
The tradeoff is area. Mercator is a cylindrical projection, effectively wrapping the globe onto a cylinder and unrolling it, and the lines of longitude that converge at the poles on the real Earth are drawn parallel instead. To keep shapes correct as those lines get artificially spread apart near the poles, the map has to stretch the land there too. The distortion follows a clean rule: the linear scale factor at a given latitude is 1 divided by the cosine of that latitude. At 70 degrees north, close to Greenland's latitude band, that works out to a linear stretch of about 2.9 times, which compounds to roughly 8.5 times the true area once you square it for both directions. A country near the equator is drawn close to true size; the same country moved near the pole balloons dramatically, even though nothing about its real size changed.
How Greenland actually compares
Greenland's real land area is about 2.17 million square kilometers, which makes it the world's largest island but still a small fraction of the continents it appears to rival on a Mercator map. Set against a handful of familiar countries, the gap is stark.
| Place | Real area | Roughly how many Greenlands fit inside |
|---|---|---|
| Greenland | 2.17 million km² | 1 |
| Africa (continent) | 30.4 million km² | About 14 |
| Brazil | 8.5 million km² | About 3.9 |
| Australia | 7.7 million km² | About 3.5 |
| India | 3.3 million km² | About 1.5 |
| DR Congo | 2.3 million km² | About 1.1 |
| Saudi Arabia | 2.15 million km² | About 1 |
| Mexico | 2.0 million km² | About 0.9 |
Greenland sits almost exactly between Saudi Arabia and DR Congo in true land area. On a Mercator world map it still reads as a shape roughly comparable to the whole African continent, purely because of where on the globe it happens to sit.
Why the internet still uses Mercator
If Mercator distorts area this badly, the obvious question is why every map app still uses a version of it. The answer is practical rather than ideological. Web maps are built from square tiles that need to line up seamlessly at every zoom level, and a conformal projection like Mercator, specifically the variant called Web Mercator, keeps north pointing the same direction everywhere and keeps small shapes, like a city block, looking correct at any zoom. That is genuinely useful for navigation and for zooming smoothly from a whole country down to a single street. The cost is that anyone using the zoomed out world view to judge relative size is being quietly misled, which is exactly the gap that makes Greenland look enormous.
Cartographers have proposed alternatives that trade some of that convenience for more honest area. The Gall-Peters projection preserves area exactly but distorts shape heavily, stretching countries near the equator vertically. Robinson and Winkel Tripel are compromise projections, accurate at neither area nor shape but reasonable at both, and Winkel Tripel has been NASA's and National Geographic's preferred choice for wall maps for decades. Equal Earth, introduced in 2018, is a newer equal area projection built specifically to look less visually stretched than Gall-Peters while still keeping true relative sizes. None of these has replaced Mercator on the web, because none solves the tiling and navigation problem Mercator was built for.
Why it is called Greenland
The name predates any of this. According to Icelandic saga tradition, recorded centuries later in works like the Saga of Erik the Red, the Norse explorer Erik Thorvaldsson, known as Erik the Red, was exiled from Iceland around 982 CE after a killing and sailed west, where he spent three years exploring the coastline. When he returned to recruit settlers, the sagas say he called the place Greenland specifically because a good name would attract people to move there, reasoning that settlers would be more inclined to go if the land had an appealing name. Whether that account is literal history or saga embellishment, it is the origin story that has stuck, and it has nothing to do with the island's actual color, most of which is ice.
Is Greenland a continent, and who governs it
Greenland is not a continent. It is the world's largest island, and geologically it sits on the North American tectonic plate rather than forming any plate of its own, which is one reason geographers group it with North America despite its closer political and cultural ties to Denmark and the rest of the Nordic region. Politically, Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own parliament and government handling most domestic affairs under the 2009 Self-Government Act, which replaced the 1979 home rule arrangement, while Denmark retains authority over defense, security and foreign policy. That arrangement has drawn fresh attention since 2025, when the United States, under the Trump administration, repeatedly expressed interest in acquiring or gaining greater control over Greenland, citing its strategic Arctic location and mineral resources. Danish and Greenlandic leaders have rejected the idea, and a January 2025 poll found 85 percent of Greenlanders opposed becoming part of the United States, with 6 percent in favor, while a majority favor eventual independence from Denmark rather than a change of sovereign.