Why does Egypt look way smaller than Ontario on Google Maps, when they are approximately the same size?
The same reason that Greenland looks like it’s the size of Australia, and Alaska could swallow the Lower 48 — when you try to project a three-dimensional surface onto a two-dimensional surface, there’s going to be distortion as you move away from whatever you’ve chosen as the equatorial plane. On a three-dimensional sphere for science class, notice that the distance between lines of longitude narrows from equator to pole until they eventually all come together at the axial point. But when you spread it out on a table… obviously those lines of longitude have to come apart. As the distance between longitude expands, the area on the map must necessarily stretch — this then gets latitude involved as well, morphing the map even further out of shape. So the farther north you go (or south, same thing), the abnormally large the area gets screwed up. So in your case, that’s why Ontario, which is at a much higher latitude, appears larger than the equal-area Egypt. It’s just a problem of proj
