How many Californias could fit inside Alaska? Around 2, 4, or 6?

It can be difficult to appreciate the true scale of the 49th state from a typical map. Alaska’s land area is so immense that you could fit California, the third-largest state in the U.S., inside its borders more than three and a half times. The popular Mercator map projection, which flattens the spherical Earth onto a rectangle, is largely to blame for this common underestimation. This projection significantly distorts and enlarges landmasses the farther they are from the equator, making it hard to accurately compare the relative sizes of regions at different latitudes.

To put its vastness in