Note 1: I guessed "three times" by passing a small coin over the map SLD posted. In the olden days, I might have Googled, selecting keywords from the query:
On a Mercator projection what is the ratio in map areas between Greenland and Australia?
Surely the calculation (or even simple pixel counting) has been done before; and the olden-days search would come up with that answer.
But now Google search gives you the Gemini word-guesser for free, so I sent the query to ChatGPT:
ChatGPT said:
Short answer: on a Mercator map, Greenland and Australia come out roughly comparable in area, with Greenland appearing about 0.6 to 1.0 times the map area of Australia, depending on exactly how you average the distortion.
[erroneous arithmetic omitted.]
Final result
On a Mercator projection, Greenland appears roughly 70–90% the area of Australia.
Visually, they can look nearly the same size, even though Australia is over three times larger in reality.
That gentle lie told by Mercator is why classroom globes quietly laugh at wall maps
The Short and Final answers are both wrong. This reaffirms the belief that LLMs remain even stupider than human, arguably even as stupid as Trump!
Gemini appeared to do SLIGHTLY better but finishd with the same wrong answer.
The winner:
DeepSeek said:
[calculations (based on crude approximations) omitted]
Greenland appears about 3.3 times the area of Australia on a Mercator map.