County Maps US

Tools Map makers and file viewers

Country Size Comparison

Greenland is not the size of Africa. Drag it south and watch it shrink to its real area, then drop Brazil onto Europe.

How to use it

  1. Pick a country from the list and press Add to map. Up to five shapes can be on the map at once.
  2. Drag a shape anywhere. It is redrawn for its new latitude so the ground area stays the same.
  3. Read the area of each shape and the "X is N times the size of Y" sentences under the list.
  4. Copy the link to share the arrangement.

How it works

The map is Web Mercator, which stretches everything away from the Equator. As you drag a shape, every vertex keeps its north-south offset from the shape's centre and has its east-west offset rescaled by the ratio of the cosines of the old and new latitude, which preserves the ground footprint at the new position. Areas are spherical polygon areas of the Natural Earth 1:110m outlines, so they run a few percent under official land areas, and the ratio between two countries is the number that matters.

Only countries are available. This site's US state shapes are stored already projected for its county maps, not as longitude and latitude, so they cannot be dragged across a world map.

Questions

Why does the shape change size when I drag it?
Because the map is Mercator. A shape near the pole is drawn much larger than the same ground area near the Equator. The tool redraws the outline for each latitude so what you see is the true relative size.
Can I compare US states?
Not in this tool. It carries country outlines only. The county and state pages on this site give the land area of every state for a numeric comparison.
Why is Greenland smaller than Wikipedia says?
The 1:110m outline is generalised and the area is computed on a sphere, which loses a few percent. The comparison between countries holds, because every country is measured the same way.

All map tools, free and without an account. Location data is processed in your browser and by the open geocoding services named on the sources page; nothing is stored by this site.