Saturday, June 18, 2016

"The True Size of" shows the true size of the countries


Do you think you can believe your eyes when you look at a world map?  "The true size of" is a site that shows you just how mistaken you are, by allowing you to drag any country next to any other, and see for yourself.

Most people will have a very clear idea of the map of our planet. The problem is that transposing a spherical surface into a rectangular planar one isn't as easy as it may sound, and creates distortions. Distortions that are actually quite big in the case of our well known Mercator projection map - which distorts areas more and more as they get farther away from the equator.


For instance, looking at the map you may feel like Greenland is almost the same size of Africa, but if you drag Greenland next to it on The True Size of you can verify that it's nothing like that. Greenland is about the same size as the D.R. of Congo.


It's cases such as this that have led some people to consider it's time to change things, and use newer techniques, like Gall-Peters projectin - which may look "strange" to those used to the old Mercator map, but would avoid such illusions that many people will think it's true.

[Mercator projection world map]

[Gall-Peters world map]

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