The plans that you studied in geography at school or any world map that you find at home does not really reflect the size of the countries in an accurate and reliable way. Created in 1596, the maps we use today are invented by Gerardus Mercator, and are actually conspicuous by their imprecision.
In fact, heThe cartographic projection itself is known as the Mercator Projection and was devised in the year 1590 to make maps of the earth’s surface.. It has been widely used since the 17th century for nautical charts and, being a cubic projection tangent to the equator, it deforms the distances between the meridians into parallel lines.
In other words, as you get closer to the continents, their actual width increases. Mercator was able to portray the correct shapes of the land masses, but it favored the wealthy northern territories, making them explode in size.
The map accompanying the cover image of this article, produced by Met Office climate data scientist Neil R Kaye, is a Accurate world map that shows you the true proportional size of countries. Guess what: the regions of the northern hemisphere are much smaller than in the Western collective imagination, and than in the world maps themselves.
In design boom you can appreciate Kaye’s map, but in an animated version.
Winners and losers on the world map
To give you the idea, On the traditional world map, Africa appears almost as large as Greenland, despite multiplying its size by 14. In the case of South America, Brazil is 5 times larger than Alaska, but the latter appears larger. Russia is also disproportionate in size, as it is actually smaller than Africa.
In general, Africa and the lands of the tropics were underrepresented.
So if you want escape from the eurocentric and colonial version that prevailed in the world through maps, this map by Kaye explodes. On Reddit the author has explained that “each country is projected on the spherical projection and is placed in the center of where it appears on the natural terrestrial projection”,
“Then some manual adjustments were made to the countries that are closest to the poles, showing that you can’t snap shapes back into a sphere once they’re laid out on the plane.”
It is not the only valid resource to change vision: Google Maps also got rid of the perspective of the German cartographer and advocated giving its maps a spherical shape.
