Greenland, with an area of 2.16 million square kilometers, is 1/14 of Africa (30.22 million square kilometers), but on the world map, the two regions look as if they are about the same size, and it is not uncommon for the "scale to fail".
Greenland island compared to the area of Africa
In fact, you have been deceived by the map, but you just don't know!
To find out the small scam on the map, we must first start from its drawing, and the most common method of drawing the map is called the Mercator projection method.
Its principle is: suppose a cylinder surrounds the earth and lights a lamp at the center of the earth's sphere, and the light maps through the earth's surface to the trajectory on the cylinder, unfolding to our common map of the world.
The Mercator projection, imagining that there is a lamp in the center of the earth's sphere, thrown onto the paper and unfolded is the map of the world
If you still don't understand, we can achieve the same effect by peeling the surface of the earth from another angle, peeling it off piece by piece like peeling oranges, and then spreading it flat.
Unfold the ground like an orange and pave it
This projection will eventually have a side effect, the closer to the North and South Poles, the greater the proportions displayed on the map. However, this deviation is generally accepted by the public, and there is a reason for this.
The closer you get to two levels, the larger the dot area
The Mercator projection method, proposed by the Dutch cartographer Mercator in 1569, is characterized by the ability to maintain the accuracy of directions and angles on the map.
Under Mercator projection, the orientation and angle are accurate
For the navigators of the time, this undoubtedly accelerated their pace of exploration of new worlds, and this method has been used until now, until later, it became the most influential of the map projection methods.
In addition to mercator projection, there are many ways to project. For example, The Winkel triple projection, the Guti and other area projections, the Penner projection and the Burgos star projection.
All kinds of projection maps / pictures from the network
If you dare to think, the map can have a thousand expressions.
If you want to visually compare the size differences in areas of different regions, it's as simple as adjusting them to the same latitude.
Let's continue to take Greenland and Africa as an example, Greenland is like an independent continent on the map, but after dragging it to Africa, it immediately shrinks a lot.
Greenland pulls to the latitude of Africa and becomes much smaller
Similarly, Antarctica looks on a map as big as 30 Australia. But if you drag it to the same latitude as Australia, it is actually a little bigger than Australia.
Antarctica is at the same latitude as Australia and is no longer huge
After playing another stacking game, after stacking Australia up along the latitude layer by layer, we will find that its area is getting larger and larger. And near the North Pole, its original shape has been seriously distorted.
The closer Australia gets to the North Pole, the larger its size
Now you know that maps are far less "honest" than you think, and what's more interesting is that maps commonly used around the world are not uniform, and many regions will choose to draw maps in their own favor.
For example, this is a map of the United States.
Maps/pictures in the eyes of Americans come from the web
This is Russian.
Map of Russia / Picture from the web
They all chose to place their area in the middle of the map.
For southern hemispheres such as Australia and South America, they prefer to use the south-up-north-down approach, so that they can be located on the top of the map.
The map of Australia is to the south
It is said that history is a little girl dressed up, but in fact, why is the map not?
Resources:
[1] China National Geographic
[2] Mercator projection, Wikipedia, 2018
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