Greenland vs. South America

Greenland vs. South America.  Which has the larger land area of the two?  Do you remember the map of the world up on the wall when you were in school?  It probably looked something like this:

Greenland looks even bigger than South America so the answer seems pretty clear. 

But wait… let’s look at them on a globe.  If you have a Hugg-A-Planet, go get it now and look.  You’ll see that Greenland is way smaller than South America.  If you don’t have a globe handy, here’s a two dimensional example:

If you Google it, you’ll find that Greenland has a land area of a little more than 2 million square kilometers (836,109 square miles), while South America has a land area of more than 17 million square kilometers (6,890,000 square miles).  So what is going on here?  South America is more than 8 times larger than Greenland.  Why does Greenland look larger on the flat map?  We have Gerardus Mercator (500^th birthday was on March 5, 2012) to thank for this curious phenomenon.  I’ll explain why this happens in my next post.

A hui ho!