Clever ‘To Scale’ Chart Reveals the True Size of Countries
When you look at a map of the world, it makes sense to assume that Greenland and Africa are similar in size. But in reality, the African continent is 14 times as big as the icy northern land mass. Including a number of offshore islands, the total area of Greenland is 836,300 square miles (2.16 million square kilometres), while Africa is 11.7 million square miles (30.4 million square kilometres).
Not only that, but the latter is three times the size of North America and also significantly larger than Russia, despite the opposite appearing true when looking at a map. So what’s going on? Well, it turns out that many countries – including Russia, Canada and Greenland – are not nearly as big as we think and that’s because of a thing called world map distortion.
This phenomenon can be attributed to the Mercator projection, a map most commonly seen hanging in classrooms and in textbooks which were created in 1596 to help sailors navigate the world. It gives the right shapes of land masses but at the cost of distorting their sizes in favour of the wealthy lands to the north.
Canada and Russia, for instance, appear to take up approximately 25 per cent of the Earth’s surface on a world map, when in reality they occupy a mere 5 per cent. Australia also doesn’t appear to be that much bigger than Alaska, even though it is the world’s sixth-largest country. In fact, it is 4.5 times bigger than Alaska.
The biggest challenge with creating a world map is that it is impossible to portray the reality of the spherical globe on a flat surface — a problem that has haunted cartographers for centuries. As a result, the shapes of world maps have typically been diverse, ranging from hearts to cones. But the diversity gradually faded away with one model, invented by Gerardus Mercator, surpassing the others.
However, its distortion was studied by Met Office climate data scientist Neil Kaye, who created a two-dimensional representation of what the world really looks like. It illustrates how countries in the northern hemisphere are much smaller than people typically think.
He did this by inputting Met Office data on the sizes of each country into Ggplot, which is a data visualisation package for statistical programming. Kaye then created the final map using a stereographic projection — a mapping function that projects a sphere onto a plane.
Mercator, who lived from 1512 to 1594, was a Flemish cartographer famous for creating a world map based on a projection which showed sailing courses as straight lines. Unlike other geography scholars from around the same time as him, he did not travel much. Instead, his knowledge of geography came from his library of over one thousand books and maps.
In the 1580s he began publishing his atlas, which he named after the giant holding the world on his shoulders in Greek mythology. In the Mercator projection, North America looks at least as big, if not slightly larger, than Africa. Greenland also looks of comparable size, but in reality, Africa is larger than both.
In fact, you can fit North America into Africa and still have space for India, Argentina, Tunisia and some left over. The map also suggests that Scandinavian countries are larger than India, whereas, in reality, the latter is three times the size of all of them put together.
