[callum85]

There's no way to take the surface of a sphere and flatten it out into a rectangle without distorting it in some way. It's called 'projecting' from 3D to 2D.

The projection used for the underlying map here is the Mercator, which stretches everything near the poles. It makes Greenland look almost as big as Africa, which it is not. It's the most common projection, but it's awful for accurately visualising the whole world at once.

But the Mercator is actually a really good projection for stuff like Google Maps, because it keeps shape and direction (not scale) accurate all over the world. Say you zoom into Iceland and then Ecuador... OK you'll need a different zoom level to get to the same real-world scale (e.g. to get to 10 miles per inch you need to zoom in closer to Ecuador than Iceland) but who cares. What matters is that, in either location, north is pretty much straight up, east is right, south is down and west is left. And also, a 10 mile road going east–west will look about the same length as a 10 mile road going north–south.

Other projections don't have these qualities, but are better for keeping overall scale the same all over the map, making relative sizes of countries look more like what you get on a 3-D globe. But most people just use Mercator for everything.