All those countries are in-continent.
I think the contiguous US like in the picture is more like 8m km² isn’t it? 9.8 must be counting Alaska, Hawaii and maybe the territories.
www.thetruesize.com is a fun interactive website for seeing how Mercator maps lie.
What’s your preferred projection?
To say that Mercator “lies” is to misrepresent the complications of projecting a 3 dimensional object onto a 2 dimensional surface. All projections “lie” in this sense because they’re simplifications of reality - that’s what a map is.
this video is based on the comic: it’s an animation on how each projection would change when shifted.
As opposed to the False Size of Africa
I don’t like that Russia looks like they just took a Mercator projection and shrank to scale. Because of its shape and location, Russia is especially distorted by the Equatorial-centred Mercator.
Also what’s with the “excluding Russia” footnote?
Europe without the part of russia that lies on the continent.
But true, Russia at the equator looks like this:
