Real sizes of countries. Our maps are wrong: what the world really looks like The true map of the earth

Have you ever thought about what actual sizes of countries different from those shown on geographical maps? In principle, such things would not be of any interest to a Soviet schoolchild, since all students knew about them, even with average academic performance.

However, in our time, the data presented in the article may shock some representatives of the new generation of youth.

So, the real sizes of countries and continents differ from what we see on maps. For example, looking at a map, you might think that Russia is significantly larger than the continent in size. In fact, Africa (≈ 30 million km²) is almost twice the size of Russia (≈ 17 million km²) in terms of territory.

Why does this depend? Maybe someone is deliberately trying to misinform us? No, friends. It's all about projection.

We offer, which within one minute will demonstrate to you what we wrote about above. Maybe after watching you will understand everything that you did not understand while reading.

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Many people are aware that the world map we are used to does not accurately reflect the real ratio of the areas of countries, much less seas and oceans. The use of the Mercator projection leads to many distortions when, for example, Greenland looks larger than Australia... A fundamentally new projection proposed by Japanese designers made it possible to construct the most accurate map of the world that humanity has ever seen.

How did they do it?

A traditional map of the world is constructed in an ancient way, in which the image from the surface of the globe is transferred to a flat map using the Mercator projection. As a result, we get Greenland on the map several times larger than Australia, while in reality Greenland is three times smaller...

But a map built according to the principles of the AuthaGraph projection can be called truly innovative! Here the proportions of land and water remain unchanged and correspond to what we see on the globe. For this development, AuthaGraph received a prestigious award - the Japanese Good Design Award.

Then comes the original process of transferring the image onto a plane by combining various methods of projection through intermediate objects. This “multi-layer mapping” reduces the number of errors and monstrous distortions that arise when traditionally unfolding the surface of a globe into a flat map.

Of course, it is impossible to achieve complete perfection, but the map from AuthaGraph comes as close as possible to it.

“Antarctica was discovered in 1820, and the first man reached the North Pole in 1909. In the 20th century, relations between East and West and North-South problems came to the forefront of world politics. The main territorial interest was the land, which was the human habitat. But since the end of the twentieth century, dwindling resources and environmental problems have forced attention to the polar regions and the territory of the oceans...

If you look at a world map, you'll probably think that North America and Russia are larger than Africa. However, in reality, Africa is three times larger than North America and significantly larger than Russia.

This strange distortion was investigated by a climate data scientist from the UK's National Weather Service (Met Office, Met Office), who created a two-dimensional map showing what the world really looks like. It turns out that many countries - including Russia, Canada and Greenland - are not as big as we think. The distortion originates from the Mercator projection, the map most commonly found in classrooms and textbooks. It was created in 1596 to help sailors navigate the sea.

What's wrong with the Mercator map?

Africa is about 14 times larger than Greenland, and yet on the map they are almost the same size. Brazil is more than 5 times the size of Alaska, but Alaska is larger than Brazil on the map. The map shows that the Scandinavian countries are larger than India, when in fact India is 3 times larger than all the Scandinavian countries combined. Although this map makes Europe look larger than North America, the opposite is actually true. Russia is also not as big as it is depicted - in fact, Africa is larger than Russia.

The biggest problem with creating an accurate map is that it is impossible to depict the reality of a spherical world on a flat map, a problem that has plagued cartographers for centuries. As a result, world map shapes tended to range from hearts to cones. But the variety gradually disappeared with the advent of one model, proposed by Gerardus Mercator in 1596. The Mercator projection shows the correct shapes of areas of land, but at the cost of distorting their sizes in favor of lands in the north.

Gerard Mercator(5 March 1512 – 2 December 1594) was a Flemish cartographer known for creating a map of the world based on a projection showing sailing routes as straight lines. Although this is what he is best known for, Mercator was more than just a geographer. He also studied theology, philosophy, history, mathematics and magnetism. Mercator was also an engraver and calligrapher, and even made globes and scientific instruments. Unlike other geographers of his time, he traveled little. Instead, his knowledge of geography was based on his library of over a thousand books and maps. In the 1580s, he began publishing his atlas, which he named after the giant in Greek mythology who held the world on his shoulders. He suffered a series of strokes in the early 1590s, which left him partially paralyzed and almost blind. The final blow caused his death in 1594 at the age of 82.

Neil Kay, climate data scientist at Met Office, has created an accurate map of the world that shows that countries in the Northern Hemisphere are much smaller than people usually think. To do this, he entered data on the size of each country into Ggplot, which is a data visualization package for statistical programming. He then created a map using projection sterographic. This is a mapping function that projects a sphere onto a plane. After this, Kay carried out manual adjustments, adjusting the size of countries that are located closer to the poles. Thus, according to Kay, it is impossible to place all the shapes again on the sphere after they have already been placed on the plane.

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The world map that we have become accustomed to since childhood and which we use almost daily in Google Maps is not entirely correct. Russia is gigantic in size; Greenland is larger than South America; The equator is not located in the middle, and the continents are elongated at the poles. This is the Mercator conformal projection.

The projection was invented in the Middle Ages by Gerard Mercator (1512-1594), a Belgian geographer and cartographer, to represent the round Earth on a two-dimensional plane for the needs of navigation. It preserves the angles between the directions (whatever that means), but the sizes of the continents are distorted.

500 years later, two smart guys made the map interactive, opening people's eyes to the real amazing world. The result is a cooler toy than Pockemon Go, where you can rearrange countries and compare them. The author of the article left to play at 12, returned only at five in the evening...

While Hillary Clinton accuses Russian hackers of hacking the mail of the US Democratic Party, let's compare Russia and America. More Russia.

But only one and a half times...

The territory of Russia could fit two Europe and two Australia, South America, Africa and Asia almost entirely... Why does Russia look smaller when “moving”? This is the Mercator projection. When moving countries, you can compare them, but we must not forget that this is just a game of imagination. In other words, Russia would be of this size if it were in the place of Africa, Australia, and so on...

Australia looks tiny on the map - somewhere on the outskirts of the world. But it's the size of America.

Larger than Europe and only slightly inferior to China.

The USA, Australia and India are located in Africa. By the way, on the interactive map you can not only move countries, but also rotate them 360 degrees. Very comfortably.

What is Greenland? I used to think that this was a huge icy continent, which for some reason was called an island.

About the size of the European part of Russia...

But this is the real Greenland! The area is the same as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the Mercator projection, the land area expands at the North and South Poles and, conversely, narrows slightly at the equator.

By the way, about the poles. Antarctica doesn't even fit on the map. The poles cannot be depicted on it - it is flat.

But what happens if you place it in the Atlantic Ocean? We have found Atlantis!

Let's move it to Russia and Antarctica again goes beyond the edges, stretching to infinity. This is what the Ice Continent would look like if it were the Russian Federation.

The largest countries in Africa...

Let's imagine Africa is trying to take over the world. It looks like M&M's spilled on the table.

America is taking over the world...

Russia... I just moved them to the North Pole area.

Place the United States in the Mediterranean Sea and you get the Roman Empire. This is how she once was. Another interesting nuance: American cities have exactly the same climate as European ones. After all, the weather in Chicago is similar to that in Bulgaria, Florida is similar to Egypt, and California can easily be confused with Spain...

On the contrary: six large European countries (Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Romania) in the United States. Conclusion: Europe can move entirely to America. And there will still be room.

Another former empire is the British. The small island country has managed to leave its legacy all over the world.

I read somewhere that 78 Italys can fit on Russian territory. I checked: 23 fit. But this is because Italy has become larger.

Japan is shaped like Baikal.

There are only four places in the world where you can admire geysers: Iceland, Kamchatka, New Zealand and Yellowstone National Park in the USA. This is what happens if you put Iceland in each of them... It's tiny.

"Moscow region" in Spain.

The tiny island could be lost somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. And no one would notice.

Or in the Gulf of Mexico...

Madagascar fits perfectly into the Sea of ​​Okhotsk.

And Jamaica is in White... But they wouldn't like it.

Have you heard about the country of New Caledonia?

No surprise...

Finally, the ten largest countries on the equator - this is the best way to compare their sizes. Russia, Canada, China, USA, Brazil, Australia, India, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Algeria. What is Algeria doing in the top ten? So I was surprised...

Hello, dear Reader! With this article we will continue the theme of the flat earth and present another fact proving the correctness of this theory. Do not rush to spit at the monitor if you are a skeptic of this topic, but simply study the proposed material and check it yourself.

Of course, most of the population is not given the opportunity to check what the map of the world in which we live should actually be. But a curious mind always wants to believe that our world is not the same as we are used to seeing it. And not only people live on this big land.

But sooner or later we will figure out all this confusion!))

World Map: false or real?

So, on our agenda. This is how she is presented to us from childhood:

It's simple. We find a map of the flat earth world on the Internet:

What do you see? Doesn't this remind you of the ratio of continents, the sizes that Yandex showed us? Coincidence or accident?

But that is not all...

Comparison

Here is the official UN emblem:

Don't notice anything?

• Firstly, on it all the continents in relation to each other are of the size that the Yandex ruler shows us;
• Secondly, it is very reminiscent of a flat earth map. Don't you find it?

Question for skeptics - How is this possible?)

Is this a coincidence or are we really being pushed into the wrong things since childhood? And most importantly, why are they doing this? And why is Russia artificially enlarged, as if they wanted to scare someone with their mass)) Or cover it up? After all, against the backdrop of huge Russia, Australia is visually lost. Maybe they are hiding something on its territory? And they want people to look anywhere but at tiny Australia? Hmm... We can only guess...

Call to action

Unfortunately, we cannot go into space, but we have the Internet, brains and eyes. Close all textbooks, we don’t know where the truth is and where the lies are. Become pioneers without looking back at history.

Start doing practical experiments. For example, get into a car and drive a long distance from one city to another on your own and compare it with the official map on Yandex.

Let's look for inconsistencies in our strange World together.

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It hides not only real sizes, but also continents. We will definitely tell you about one of them on the pages of the site soon.