| True area | On the old Mercator map | Distortion vs truth |
| Turks and Caicos Islands | 331 km² | 384 km² | 1.2× |
| Greenland | 2,154,754 km² | 25,447,645 km² | 11.8× |
| Africa | 30,370,000 km² | — | 1× |
Old maps drew Turks and Caicos Islands at about 384 km² km². The truth is 331 km² km² — a difference of 16%% that school atlases carried for centuries.