About
An interactive experiment about projection distortion, built so you can check the claim yourself rather than take it on faith.
Why this exists
Everyone has heard that Mercator exaggerates the high latitudes. Very few people have checked. A static side-by-side can state the conclusion, but it cannot let you confirm it yourself.
This turns the claim into an experiment you run: pick a country or a continent, drag it to the equator, and watch what it becomes. The original position stays as a ghost outline for reference, and the number next to it is one you can check.
One concrete case
Africa is about 13.7 times larger than Greenland in reality. On this Mercator map, Greenland is drawn slightly larger than Africa.
Drag Greenland to the equator and it shrinks to roughly a sixteenth of what it was, ending up under a fifth of Africa. Nothing is fudged along the way: the shape's ground size never changes. Only Mercator's magnification of it does.
What it is not
It is not a GIS tool and does not aim to become one. Boundaries are simplified, Earth is treated as a sphere, and the selectable objects are a fixed short list.
Every accuracy trade-off is written down on the data page rather than buried. A tool whose argument is that maps mislead you has no standing to be vague about its own.