It seems that the world is not as we think it is…
I was looking through Facebook randomly last night, as you do, and I saw a video which blew my mind.
It seems that the map of the world which we are used to doesn’t actually properly reflect the land mass of those countries in the correct way at all.
People are used to the Mercator projection of where countries are, but it appears that the further north you go, the larger countries seem.
It is of course very difficult to accurately mark the sphere of the globe on a flat surface completely perfectly, and there are bound to be a few mistakes because the surfaces are completely different.
But there seems to be political ramifications to the way this map appears because distortion of northern hemisphere countries can make them seem bigger than they are, which in turn suggests they are more powerful.
The best example of how the map is wrong can be seen by the fact that Greenland is actually 14 times smaller than Africa. If you look at a map, they both appear to be the same size.
Alaska also looks much, much bigger than Texas on a map. Again, in reality they are a much similar in size.
Scandinavian countries appear to be the same size as India, where in fact India is actually three times bigger than these countries.
Australia is also comfortably the same size as Europe, but you might not be able to tell if you look at the map.
It has led to some schools in Boston using the Galls-Peters projection, which shows Africa in a truer sense.
Africa can fit in America, India, Argentina, and Tunisia, with some more countries to spare.
It is always good to try and look at the world in a different way. These maps can help you to literally do that.