The largest to smallest landmasses in the world

One of the most critical problems of the Mercator projection is that it distorts the territories' actual sizes.

The Mercator projection stretches the sizes of landmasses close to the poles as a side effect. As a result, Canada and Russia seem to take up almost 25 percent of the planet's surface, but these nations only own five percent.

The map below presents the real size of all nations and dependencies by area.