Watch This When You’re High - Why Every Map Of The World Is Wrong

Dante3/08/2022 2:00 AM

Shout out to an informative documentary on the History Channel I watched about Russia’s history for this little buddy tidbit.

Turns out Russia is NOWHERE near the size it appears on world maps. Neither is the US. And Greenland is nowhere close to as big as it seems.

Yes, Russia spans 11 different time zones, but that’s because of how far north it sits on the longitudinal grid, not because it’s that big.

Some other fun facts from this -

The distortion on "the map" we generally know is the result of the "Mercator map (projection)" which was created in 1596 to help sailors navigate the world
It gives the right shapes of countries but at the cost of distorting sizes in favor of the wealthy lands to the north
A perfect example, North America looks larger, if not just as big as Africa, and Greenland also looks of comparable size
In reality, you can fit North America into Africa and still have space for India, Argentina, Tunisia and some leftover
The biggest challenge for cartographers is that it is impossible to portray the reality of a spherical world on a flat map
In reality, China is four times bigger than Greenland, Africa is three times bigger than North America and Mexico is larger than Alaska.

Here is the World Mercator map projection with true country size and shape added. This is crazy.

One of the best alternatives to the Mercator projection was presented in 1974 by D. Arno Peters (pictured below). The Gall-Peters projection makes seeing the relative size of places much easier. However, it also has its flaws as certain places appear stretched, horizontally near the poles and vertically near the Equator