About
Greenland looks as big as Africa. In fact Africa is fourteen times larger. Geoscope.ch lets you see it for yourself: pick a country, move it across the map and compare it with others at the same latitude.
Why maps deceive
Almost every world map you come across, and almost every map on the web, uses the Mercator projection, drawn by Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for navigation. It has one great strength: shapes and angles stay true, and a route on a constant bearing becomes a straight line. It also has a cost: to keep the meridians straight, the map stretches everything far from the equator.
At 60° latitude (Oslo, Helsinki, Anchorage) distances are doubled and areas quadrupled; at 75° areas are fifteen times their real size. The closer you get to the poles, the more the map exaggerates, until the poles themselves no longer fit.
How to use it
- Pick a country: click it on the map, or type its name in the search field. A coloured copy appears; a dashed outline stays in its original place.
- Regions, states and cantons: they can only be found through the search, below the countries (“Bavaria”, “Texas”, “Ticino”…), and they move just like countries. For Italy, France, Spain and the United Kingdom there are both regions and provinces.
- Move it: drag it wherever you like. Towards the poles it swells, towards the equator it shrinks, exactly like the countries around it on the map. Its real area never changes: only how much the map enlarges it.
- Compare: up to eight countries at once. The panel shows each one's area and population and how many times larger (or smaller) it is than the reference country, for both; the card (the “i” next to the name) adds population, density, flag and sources.
- Share: the “Share” button creates a short link and a QR code. Whoever opens it finds the same countries in the same places, with the same groups and layers turned on: handy for Moodle or for showing in class. Links never expire.
- Shapes: “Add a shape”, below the search field, puts a circle, a square or a triangle of 1 or 10 million km² on the map. On Earth they always keep the same form and area: moving them shows that Mercator enlarges small shapes without distorting them, while large ones get distorted (a large square moved towards the pole becomes a trapezoid).
- See the globe: the globe button, below + and −, switches from the flat map to the globe. On the globe every country has its true size: the moved copy and the dashed outline become the same size.
- Layers: the button below the globe turns on the main parallels (equator, tropics, polar circles), a grid of parallels and meridians every 15° and Tissot's circles: circles all identical on Earth, 500 km in radius, which the map enlarges just like countries. Then the time zones: the real ones, with the borders set by each state (in standard time, without daylight saving), and the theoretical ones, 15° slices centred on Greenwich. Finally the UTM grid: 60 numbered zones 6° wide and 8° bands marked by a letter (Lugano is in 32T); zooming in shows the name of each cell.
- Continents: “Add a continent” puts a whole continent on the map, to be moved in one piece just like a country. Below the continents there are also Central America and the Caribbean (from Mexico to Panama, with all the islands) and the European Union, to compare for example with the United States or China: the EU is less than half the size of either.
- Groups of countries: “Highlight a group of countries” colours the members of the G7, NATO, BRICS and other organisations in place; at the bottom you see how many they are, how large and how many people live there. A group can also be found through the search (“NATO”, “G20”…). Members come from Wikidata, checked by hand, and are updated every month. Where a group does not cover a whole country, the excluded part is left out of the figures too: Svalbard is neither Schengen nor European Economic Area, overseas France is not Schengen.
- Start over: the house brings the map back to the starting view; “Remove all” clears the comparison and turns off the highlighted groups.
Population pyramids
The Pyramids page shows how the
population of every country and region of the world is made up by age
and sex, from 1950 to 2100. The slider changes the year (the button
next to it plays through the years, and clicking the number lets you
type one); up to 2023 the figures are estimates, after that they are
UN projections, drawn lighter. Hovering over a row shows the values
for men and women. You can compare with another country or with the
same country in another year, with the pyramids side by side or
overlaid, in absolute numbers or as percentages. The page address
keeps your choices and is easy to read (for example
/en/pyramids/italy/2026/vs/niger): to share a comparison,
copy it or use the Share button, which also makes a QR code. A
country's card on the map links to its pyramid.
Below the pyramid you will also find children per woman, the replacement level, life expectancy, birth and death rates and net migration, with the world value for the same year in brackets. The Over time section shows the same data from 1950 to 2100 in six small charts, with the world in grey for reference: the orange line is the chosen year, and clicking a chart takes the pyramid to that year. The i button next to a title explains what that chart measures, ⤢ opens it full screen (the arrows move to the others) and ⤓ downloads it as a PNG image, with title, legend, source and logo, ready for a presentation or a test. The same goes for the pyramids: the image shows what you see, comparison included, with a line of figures for each pyramid.
The replacement level is the number of children per woman needed for each generation to be replaced by one of the same size, leaving migration aside. It is usually given as 2.1: two children to replace the parents, plus a little because more boys than girls are born and because some girls die before reaching adulthood. The real value therefore depends on mortality: here it is calculated for every country and every year from UN data on female mortality, fertility by age and the sex ratio at birth. In 1950 it was above 3 in many countries; in Europe today it is about 2.05, and in some African countries still close to 2.5. When fertility stays below this level for a long time, the population, without immigration, shrinks.
Where the data comes from
Areas and population are those published by the World Bank; where missing, those from Wikidata. They update themselves every month, and every figure in the card states its source and year. Country outlines come from Natural Earth, which follows de facto borders: disputed territories can be picked separately.
A moved country carries its main territory with it: distant islands and territories (Hawaii for the United States, French Guiana for France) stay where they are. The areas in the card, however, are the official figures for the whole country.
Antarctica can be moved too: it is not a country, but it is the most striking example, since on the map it looks like an endless strip. It cannot go back exactly to its place, though, because the Mercator map does not reach the South Pole: its copy appears a little further north.
Continents are a convention
Where Europe ends and Asia begins is not decided by nature: it is an agreement, and not everyone makes it the same way. Here the border between Europe and Asia follows the Urals, the Ural river, the Caucasus and the Bosphorus; the one between the two Americas runs between Panama and Colombia. For uncertain cases the choice is:
- Cyprus: Europe
- Iceland: Europe
- Georgia: Asia
- Armenia: Asia
- Azerbaijan: Asia
- Greenland: North America
- Central America (Belize to Panama): North America
- Caribbean: North America
- European Russia (west of the Urals): Europe
- Turkish Thrace (with Istanbul): Europe
- Western Kazakhstan (west of the Ural river): Europe
- Sinai Peninsula: Asia
- Indonesian Papua (western New Guinea): Asia
The area and population of a continent are the sum of the countries and parts of countries that belong to it. Antarctica, which is not a country, can be found like the countries.
Sources and licences
- World Bank, World Development Indicators — area and population (CC BY 4.0)
- Wikidata — country names, missing figures, links to Wikipedia (CC0)
- United Nations, World Population Prospects 2024 — population pyramids, fertility, mortality and migration, estimates and projections (CC BY 3.0 IGO)
- Natural Earth — outlines of countries, regions and provinces (public domain)
- Protomaps — base map, with data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
- timezone-boundary-builder — time zone boundaries, with data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
- MapLibre GL JS — map rendering (BSD)
- flag-icons — flags (MIT)
- Flag of the Antarctic Treaty — Alakasam, derivative work by B1mbo, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0), adapted to 4:3 proportions
- qrcode-generator — QR codes (MIT)
- Noto Sans — label font (SIL Open Font License)
Who makes it
Geoscope.ch is a project by Pixelized.ch Sagl, Lugano, Switzerland. Reports, data errors and suggestions: info@pixelized.ch. How the data of people using the site is handled is explained on the Privacy page.