Africa is a fascinating continent. It has jungles and deserts and even a glacier. It is the only continent that covers all four hemispheres (north, south, east and west). And as you can see in the map graphic above, Africa is larger than China, the United States, India, Japan and all of Europe combined. We often don't realize how highly distorted our view of the earth is due to common mapping projections, such as
Mercator. The size of the land masses closest to the poles is exaggerated so as to keep the lines of latitude running straight. For example, just take a look at how a Mercator projection shows the size of Greenland versus the size of Australia:
Below is an accurate comparison of the two:
A far more accurate world map is the
Goode homolosine projection, also called the orange-peel map. The
Gall-Peters projection is fascinating (if controversial) because it represents size accurately, but not shape.
Forgive this post if you find it boring - this is my nerd side coming out. I just love Geography and always wanted to become a
seismologist.
Image credits: Kai Krause and Wikipedia
not boring at all. the first image is very neat.
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