One of the most common map projections is Mercator — the one you've seen your whole life. It's great for navigation, but it badly stretches land the closer you get to the poles, so high-latitude places look far bigger than they truly are. Switch View to Equal Earth or the Globe when you want honest sizes.
- Open Choose anything to compare… — countries, oceans, empires, rainforests, deserts, states & provinces (Texas, Ontario, Queensland, …), and more. Mix them in one scene. The list also has Examples. Click the basemap to add a country quickly.
- Drag its coloured shape anywhere. It moves as a rigid shape on the globe, so its true size never changes — but Mercator inflates it near the poles and shrinks it near the equator, revealing the distortion.
- Select a shape, then use the compass to rotate it. Turn on All to twist every shape together (great after Stack); use 0° / 90° to snap.
- The panel shows real area, Mercator stretch, and a live how many fit readout for the selected shape.
- Switch View to Equal Earth or the Globe, use Stack / Animate, or copy Share / Embed links for the current scene.
This is a static site — no accounts. We use Umami for analytics: a privacy-friendly, cookieless tool that records anonymous, aggregated page views. Map data and libraries (D3, TopoJSON, Natural Earth) are loaded only from the jsDelivr CDN. If you pick a map-tile style (OpenStreetMap, Carto, OpenTopo, Esri, NASA GIBS, etc.), your browser also requests tiles from those providers — they may see your IP address, as with any map on the web. Raster tiles only work in the Mercator view (Blue Marble tops out at low zoom). Your map setup (countries, view, and position) lives in the page URL so you can bookmark or share it. One small UI preference — whether the tools panel was left open — is saved in your browser's local storage. If you use the Contact form, your name, email, and message are sent to us by email (via Resend) so we can reply.
