The world map on classroom walls, in atlases, and on Google Maps has been quietly wrong for nearly 500 years — the Mercator projection that became the global standard in 1569 inflates landmasses near the poles so dramatically that Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa, when in reality 14 Greenlands could fit inside the African continent — a distortion the African Union formally moved to correct in August 2025

The world map on classroom walls, in atlases, and on Google Maps has been quietly wrong for nearly 500 years — the Mercator projection that became the global standard in 1569 inflates landmasses near the poles so dramatically that Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa, when in reality 14 Greenlands could fit inside the African continent — a distortion the African Union formally moved to correct in August 2025

The map of the world hanging on the wall of nearly every classroom in the world, printed in the front of nearly every atlas, and displayed by default on Google Maps when most users open the application on their phones, is geometrically wrong about the sizes of countries. It always has been. The map is the Mercator projection, created by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for the navigational needs of the European age of sail, and…