There are several ways of projecting the surface of a surface on a flat piece of paper. One of the oldest chartographic ones is the Mercator projection. This projection has the advantage that it preserves the angles between meridians and latitude circles (as well as other curves). But due to that advantage, it has to depict the regions near the poles very distorted so as to preserve the angles. Areas in very low and very high latitudes (far from the equator) are multiplied in size relative to the size they should have. Thus, on Mercator projections, areas like the Antarctic, Greenland and even Canada, Alaska are ridiculously oversized, while areas near the equators are comparatively depicted as much smaller; Africa and Greenland have roughly the same size in a Mercator map, but since Africa is near the equator, its actual size is much larger; it is 14 times larger than Greenland.