![]() In the 1980s, it became widely used in classrooms to teach geography, and until 2018, was Google's choice of map projection. The way it’s designed means that objects closer to the equator appear in relative scale to one another, but objects closer to the poles appear larger than they are. Originally designed to be a navigator's tool, the Mercator Map Projection has for centuries been a mariner's best friend, because it represents lines of constant true direction, which means a straight line connecting any two points on the map will travel in the same direction that a compass would show. Suddenly, we see countries like the United States, Canada and Russia shrink (and separate, so that seas appear where there are none), while the giant landmasses of Africa and South America remain more or less the same.Īustralia, which is the planet's sixth largest country by size after Russia, Canada, China, the US and Brazil, also remains consistent across the animation. This clever animation by Neil Kaye, a climate data scientist at the Met Office - the United Kingdom's national weather service - shows what the Mercator Projection would look like if it depicted the true size of each country in relation to others. One of the best known and commonly used world maps, the Mercator Projection, depicts Greenland and Africa as being roughly the same size. Follow him on Twitter at on Faceboo k.Neil Mercator Map Projection with the true size and shape of the country overlaid. ![]() ACTUAL MAP OF THE WORLD SERIESWhy Making Accurate World Maps Is Mathematically Impossibleĭownload 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collectionīased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. ACTUAL MAP OF THE WORLD DOWNLOADNew York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Now Free Online ![]() Japanese Designers May Have Created the Most Accurate Map of Our World: See the AuthaGraph Does that (to quote the humorless representative of the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality in the West Wing episode cited as one inspiration for the True Size Map) blow your mind? When you click and drag those borders to another part of the world, specifically a part of the world at a different latitude, you’ll notice that the shape of the dragged country seems to deform.īut that appearance of distortion is only relative to the shapes and sizes we’ve long internalized from the Mercator map: when you move Australia up and it covers a third of Russia, or when you move the vast-looking Greenland down and it doesn’t even cover Argentina, you’re looking - perhaps for the first time - at a geographically accurate size comparison. Hence the need for such re-imaginings of the world map as The True Size, “a website that lets you compare the size of any nation or US state to other land masses, by allowing you to move them around to anywhere else on the map.” Just search for any country in the box in the map’s upper-left corner, and that country’s borders will appear highlighted in color. ![]()
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