Depictions of countries on a world map do justice to their sizes.
Okay, this may not be something everyone believes, but I’ve had experiences where people immediately refer to a flat world map to see if country A is larger than country B. The map we’re all accustomed to seeing (shown below) is the result of a phenomenon called Mercator projection which is a way of projecting a spherical 3-D object into a rectangular 2-D plane.
The above image makes Greenland look much larger than Australia, while in reality, Australia is nearly three-and-a-half times larger then Greenland. Similarly, distances are also distorted and places in the higher latitudes are closer than depicted in the image.
Although not perfect, a better way of visualizing distances in a projection of the globe is using equal-image projections.
Here’s how the world looks when you use an equal image projection
(Source – Gall–Peters projection)