How Giant is Africa? The shrunken continent
The USA, China, India and Japan together cover about three quarters of Africa's area. See why a Mercator map hides it.
The second-largest continent looks modest on the map
On many wall maps and in apps, Africa looks comparable to Greenland or clearly smaller than North America. In reality it covers about 30.4 million km² and is the second-largest continent in the world, after Asia.
Africa is about three times larger than the United States (9.83 million km²) and China (9.6 million km²), and almost 100 times larger than Poland (312,679 km²). A Mercator map hides this. Africa lies roughly between 37° north and 35° south, where this projection enlarges areas by at most about 1.6 times. Countries farther north are enlarged much more, so next to them Africa looks smaller than it is.
Which is larger in reality: Africa or Greenland?
Geographic Tetris: what fits inside Africa?
Popular graphics fit several large countries inside the outline of Africa. Let us check it with the figures from the UN Demographic Yearbook:
- United States: 9.83 million km²
- China: 9.6 million km²
- India: 3.29 million km²
- Japan: 0.38 million km²
Together that is about 23.1 million km², roughly three quarters of Africa's area. More than 7 million km² are still left, an area over 23 times the size of Poland. This compares areas, not a literal puzzle: the shapes of countries do not fit together like blocks. You can overlay the outlines yourself in the Poland and Africa comparison.
Countries that look smaller than they are
Nigeria covers 923,768 km², almost three times the area of Poland, yet it looks small on a Mercator map. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (2.35 million km²) is larger than France, Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom combined (about 1.96 million km²).
How can Africa be shown at its true scale?
Equal-area maps keep the proportions of continents, for example the Equal Earth projection or the Mollweide projection. Equal Earth is the projection recommended by the 2026 UN General Assembly resolution, put forward by Togo on behalf of the African Group. Read more in The UN's new world map.