Donald Trump spoke to a journalist in the White House in 2021 about his desire to acquire Greenland: “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive, and that should be part of the United States.’”
He might not have mentioned the 16th-century Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator, but the US president was clearly channelling the distorted impression that Mercator’s eponymous — and now ubiquitous — map projection gives of the Arctic Danish island.
A map of the world using Mercator’s projection shows Greenland as an enormous landmass, roughly equivalent in size to Africa. In reality, 14 Greenlands could fit inside the continent — at 2.2mn sq km, the Danish island is smaller than Algeria, let alone Africa.
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