2023-05-08 18:34:42
UK Daily News with John Hare
Clever 'to scale' chart reveals the true size of Earth's countries
How big is Greenland?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).
Why is Russia isn’t as big as we thought?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 text books which was 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.
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