True-size globe view
Drag to rotate the Earth. Use the comparison set to center a country.
Drag to spin the globe. The comparison set stays at true scale. Hold Cmd/Ctrl to drag countries.
True Size Globe
Spin the orthographic globe to compare countries at their real scale.
Drag to rotate the Earth. Use the comparison set to center a country.
Drag to spin the globe. The comparison set stays at true scale. Hold Cmd/Ctrl to drag countries.
True Globe Guide
Spin an orthographic globe to compare countries at their real scale, free of the Mercator distortion that inflates places near the poles. Then drop a country onto the Moon, Mars, or another planet to see how it measures up against other worlds.
A flat Mercator map stretches land toward the poles, so Greenland and Russia look far larger than they are. A globe keeps relative areas honest, which is why country comparisons look so different here.
A globe shows land area without Mercator distortion, so high-latitude countries like Greenland and Russia stop looking oversized. An orthographic globe is the closest a screen gets to true relative area.
Dropping a country onto another world shows scale directly. The Moon has about 38 million km² of surface, roughly a quarter of Earth’s land area, while Mars has about 145 million km², close to all of Earth’s land combined.
It renders Earth as if viewed from deep space: the visible hemisphere keeps its round shape and near-true areas around the center, unlike a flat map that has to stretch the poles.
Greenland, Russia, Canada, and Antarctica are the most exaggerated, because Mercator stretching grows with distance from the equator.