If I were to say the words “Mercator projection” would you know what I was talking about? Many have probably heard it before but my guess is that few know what it is. Then again, I’ve been amazed by my ignorance on subjects like this before.
About a year ago I started following a page on Instagram that posts different maps or charts showing the ranges of density, population, area, etc. Anything to do with geographical stats.
At one point it shared information on the Mercator projection. I didn’t know what it was at the time but after researching my mind was blown. What I had come to believe was a reality for so many years was gone. Below you will see is a map of the world (thanks Wikipedia) Everything looks normal, as you normally see it on a map, right?
It always fascinated how huge places like Greenland and Alaska were. These giants that were so vast yet were probably unexplored because of the climate. One of the facts that I had known before was that the US, without Alaska, was a smaller country by sq mi than China. Over 500,000 sq mi smaller. But, with the addition of Alaska, the US became just slightly larger. The US being 3.797 million sq mi with Alaska and China being 3.705 million sq mi.
So, I knew Alaska was a giant of a state, as it looked in all of the maps.
But what if Alaska wasn’t actually as big as it looked?
Here’s a stat that might surprise you. If you look in the map above, Greenland and Africa look about the same size. Greenland might even look a tad larger. But when you compare their sq mi’s something doesn’t add up.
Greenland sq mi: 836,300 thousand
Africa sq mi: 11.73 million
Wait, so how is Africa over 12 times bigger yet they look the same.
And THAT’S where the Mercator projection comes in. Below is a picture of what these places actually look like side by side. Greenland looks like it had a baby of itself. It’s tiny.
The answer is simple. The world is round. It’s hard to make round things flat. Gerardus Mercator did the best he could to make it as true as possible, but unless you’re using a globe, there’s simply no way to make it look exactly how it is.
There are dozens of other projections out there that you can try and use, but all of them have their faults. It’s amazing to me how long you can believe something is real when in reality it’s a false representation of what something truly is…I’m sure there’s some deep meaning you could pull out of that, but I’ll leave that up to you.