Why Africa Looks Small on Google Maps and How to Fix It
When you open Google Maps, Africa looks almost the same size as Greenland. That's a lie. In reality, Africa is 14 times larger. The Mercator map projection, used by Google and billions of people every day, has been shrinking the second-largest continent for centuries. Now the African Union is fighting back, and the implications reach far beyond geography.
We Filipinos know what it means to be misrepresented. Our archipelago of 7,641 islands gets reduced to a speck on world maps. The Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, distorts landmasses near the equator. Africa shrinks. The Philippines shrinks. Indonesia shrinks. Meanwhile, Europe and North America loom larger than life.
Why Does Google Maps Make Africa Look So Small?
The answer goes back 450 years. The Mercator projection preserves local shapes and angles, a mathematical property called conformality. This made it perfect for navigation. Sailors could plot a straight course. That usefulness kept it alive for centuries.
But Mercator sacrifices area and distance. Places near the equator shrink. Places closer to the poles expand. Africa's land area is 30.37 million square kilometers. Greenland is 2.16 million. On your screen, they look nearly the same. That's not a minor error. That's a distortion that shapes how billions perceive an entire continent.
What Is the African Union Doing About It?
On April 7, the 55-member African Union tasked Togo to draft a resolution for the United Nations General Assembly to consider in September. The resolution calls on governments and global institutions to