The Visual Capitalist recently highlighted a wonderful map from Neil Kaye which demonstrates how dramatically the Mercator projection overstates the size of countries farther from the equator. Pair it with this GeoAwesomeness article about the inherent challenges of mapping a sphere onto a plane.
Rachel Strohm 
of course this projection gives you huge gaps between countries that aren’t actually there too. its the problem of projecting a spherical image onto a flat surface. Apparently this image is blowing people’s minds at the moment I’ve seen it floating around on facebook everywhere. But honestly if you think about it logically it shouldn’t surprise anyone. Nevertheless Russia and Canada remain the world’s two biggest countries. They are just not nearly the size people have in their minds!
LikeLike