All is not as it seems!Some countries are A LOT smaller than they appear.
All is not as it seems!
And Russia, Canada, The USA and most of Europe are actually far smaller than they appear on a standard map of the world.
That is according to Neil Kaye, a climate data scientist at the Met Office in the UK - who claims to have designed a true projection of each countries size in comparison to one another.
Why the confusion? Well most of the day-to-day maps we use are based on Mercator projection. Designed almost 450 years ago, even Google Maps used this projection until just a few months ago.
However, it’s surprisingly bad at accurately reflecting the true size of many countries.
The below GIF created by Kaye, shows how the Mercator projection distorts the true size of many countries, especially those further away from the equator.
Animating the Mercator projection to the true size of each country in relation to all the others.
Focusing on a single country helps to see effect best.#dataviz #maps #GIS #projectionmapping #mapping pic.twitter.com/clpCiluS1z
— Neil Kaye (@neilrkaye) October 12, 2018
Just take a look at how severely Russia, Canada, and Greenland changed size.
While Europe, parts of Asia, and the US also shrink away a considerable amount.
The Mercator map shows Greenland as a landmass larger than Africa. But in reality Africa is 14 times bigger than Greenland.
"Each country is projected to the spherical projection and placed at the center of where it appears in the Natural Earth projection," Kaye explained on Reddit.
"There was then some manual tweaking of countries that are closer to the poles," he added.
"This demonstrates you can't fit shapes on a sphere back together again once you put them on the flat."
How could the Mercator map be so wrong? Well it's intentional... sort of.
The map has been in use since 1569 and has proved very useful for exploration as it allows a navigator to plot a straight-line course and maintains the country’s true shape.
And basically whenever you're trying to make a three-dimensional shape, such as a globe, into a two-dimensional shape... something’s got to give.
