Cool World Map Distorted Size Images. A great tool for educators. The standard classroom maps we all learned geography from are based on the mercator projection, a 16th century rendering that preserved lines used for navigation while hideously distorting the true sizes of continents and oceans further from the equator.
Most of the world maps you’ve seen in your life. Antarctica is 5,400,000 mi², compared to africa's 11,730,000 mi². Our world maps are wrong:
It’s Fascinating To Glance At The Entire Map And See The Amazing Locations That Contain Oceans, Mountains, Continents And Even Countries.
It wasn’t an accurate picture of the world, but it provided an accurate basis for navigators to chart their courses using a convenient straight line. To account for the globe shape of the world, mercator blew out the size of the rectangles on the map as they grew away from the equator, which then distorted the size of the land masses. We also have misconceptions about the relative size of things.
December 11, 2020 By Wun.
Our maps have been lying to us for centuries. It was inspired by a similar animation that i saw on reddit and decided i wanted to try to build the same thing. Geographer and cartographer gerardus mercator came up with a solution back in 1569.
#1 Us Moved Down Next To Australia Looks Unbelievably Small The True Size Report Final Score:
On the map below, mexico has exploded to almost 4x the size of canada. Our world maps are wrong: A brief history of the mercator projection
Locations Aren’t The Only Way Our Mental Maps Can Be Wrong;
Now, if we take it to the north pole, it looks way bigger than greenland (2,166,086 sq km), which is, in reality, true according to their size. Getty despite being one of the most popular map projections, the map makes western nations appear larger. You may be surprised at what you find!
The Result Of This Is That Some Regions Look Far Bigger On The Map Than They Are In Reality, While Others Are Drawn Much Smaller.
166 points post size of contiguous united states not counting alaska & hawaii, the 48 contiguous states occupy a combined area of 3.12 million sq. Whilst it’s difficult to accurately portray a 3 dimensional shape on a 2 dimensional surface, there are ways to minimise the distortion, such as using the goode homolosine projection maps. Map distortion and the true size of countries when looking at a 2d map of the world you are not seeing the true size of countries due to map distortion.