30 Real World Maps That Show The True Size Of Countries

When you look at the globe, things are nearer or farther from your eyes. If you simply take the surface off of the globe and stretch it on a table, part of the material will shrink and it'll be a weird shape that's hard to interpret (called a Boggs eumorphic). To control for this, people invented projections, the most famous being the Mercator projection, which is called a conformal projection because it keeps countries the same shape (conformal = same form). The idea is to have accurate angles in a rectangular shaped map. To keep the angles equal as you project the surface of the sphere on a rectangle, you need to multiply the distances by a factor that is bigger the farther you go from the equator. In fact, the last point, 90º from the equator, is multiplied by infinity. (Of course, points are 0-dimensional, so multiplying them by infinity doesn't actually make an infinite map.) That makes things far from the equator look bigger. This goes both ways, so, if you make a rectangular projection that is area-accurate, then it it's no longer conformal: which means the shape changes. That's what happened here.

That's called a geographic projection, you can't accurately project a shape from a sphere to a square especially if it's from the poles of the sphere or the area around it.

This is incorrect. Russia's maximum is about 5600 miles and africa's maximum is about 5000.

shortest route by flight will take you almost 12 hours from Dakar to Mogadishu... Africa is much larger than most people realize.

I like how you just assumed it was a few hours at most without looking anything up or ever having tried it. Moron

You are a f*****g moron

This article is only supposed to show the distortion on the map and not the actual size of the countries compared to each other. If Russia would be portrayed on a map in the same place as Africa it would appear to be a different size. Just as when you'd portray Africa in the same place as Russia on the card.

.Did you notice that the image of Russia is also wider on the above than the image of Africa? The difference in the width of each at that point is noted in the borders of each image.

All of the countries are of the same size anywhere on the map, it's all because of the projection. You all know that Earth is a sphere, right? So if you unfold a sphere you will not get a square or rectangular piece of paper. SO to fit all of that on a rectangular shaped paper (map) without empty spaces you have to stretch areas that are near north and south poles, that's why Russia looks bigger up north and smaller on the Equator. There was an article here about some globe makers, here's the link: https://www.boredpanda.com/handmade-globes-custom-bespoke-bellerby/ check it out.

No it doesn't. Notice that part of Russia's projection from left and right extend to the Ocean. If you cut that and cover Africa's land mass it will cover almost most of it. So, the projection is inaccurate.

You do understand there are tiny dots on the poles that cover 360 degrees? That doesn't mean they cover the whole world.

You must be fun at parties.

well I will tell you that if you go on google earth and you measure from Krasnyy Kamen' ( Russian Border with Belarus) with a straight line across 4633.04 Miles to Mt. Chikurachki and from Dakar, Senagal to Somalia is 4625.78 miles you will see its pretty accurate.

This does not imply that is is small. After all, you need absolute figures for that. It, however, illustrates that russia as a whole is not bigger than the whole african continent, what you might think by looking at a map.

The point is the world maps we are used to seeing do not represent actual sizes of countries because the maps have to be flat while the world is NOT flat, so all countries placed nearest to the poles look much much bigger in flat world maps than they are in reality. When placing the map of Russia on top of the map of Africa, the author is trying to show us the real sizes of both places in relation to one another.