The images of the continents on the maps are erroneous. Real model

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

If you look at a map of the world, you will probably think that North America and Russia are larger than Africa. In reality, however, Africa is three times the size of North America and significantly larger than Russia.

This strange distortion was investigated by climate data scientists from the UK's National Meteorological Service (Met Office), who created a two-dimensional map showing what the world really looks like. It turned out that many countries - including Russia, Canada and Greenland - are not as big as we think. Distortion originates from the Mercator projection, the map most commonly seen in classrooms and textbooks. It was created in 1596 to help sailors navigate the sea.

© Met Office

What's wrong with the Mercator map?

Africa is about 14 times the size of Greenland, and yet they are nearly the same size on the map. Brazil is more than 5 times the size of Alaska, but Alaska is larger than Brazil on the map. The map shows that the Scandinavian countries are larger than India, while in fact India is 3 times the size of all the Scandinavian countries combined. While Europe looks larger than North America on this map, the opposite is actually true. Russia is also not as big as it is depicted - in fact, Africa is larger than Russia.

© Wikimedia

The biggest problem with making an accurate map is that it is impossible to depict the reality of a spherical world on a flat map - a problem that has plagued cartographers for centuries. As a result, the shapes of world maps tended to be varied - from hearts to cones. But the variety gradually disappeared with the arrival of one model, proposed by Gerardus Mercator in 1596. The Mercator projection shows the regular shape of the parcels of land, but at the cost of distorting their size in favor of the land to the north.

Gerard Mercator(March 5, 1512 - December 2, 1594) - Flemish cartographer, famous for creating a map of the world from a projection showing sailing routes in the form of straight lines. While this is what he is best known for, Mercator was more than just a geographer. He also studied theology, philosophy, history, mathematics and magnetism. Mercator was also an engraver and calligrapher, and even made globes and scientific instruments. Unlike other geographers of the time, he traveled little. Instead, his knowledge of geography was based on his library of over a thousand books and maps. In the 1580s, he began publishing his atlas, which he named after a giant from Greek mythology who held the world on his shoulders. He suffered a series of strokes in the early 1590s that left him partially paralyzed and nearly blind. The last blow caused his death in 1594 at the age of 82.

Neil Kay, climate data scientist at the Met Office, has created an accurate map of the world that shows that the countries in the Northern Hemisphere are much smaller than people usually think. To do this, he entered the size data for each country into Ggplot, which is a visualization data package for statistical programming. He then created a map using the sterographic projection. It is a display function that projects a sphere onto a plane. After that, Kay did some manual adjustments, adjusting the size of the countries that are closer to the poles. Thus, according to Kay, you cannot put all the shapes back on the sphere after they have already been laid on the plane.

The Japanese have designed the most accurate map of the world. All previous ones are not correct

We form an idea of the world with those pictures that are available to us from childhood. These are programs about the Earth and … school maps. But as it turned out, the cards are wrong! They are designed for clarity rather than scientific accuracy. But this map is as accurate as possible! …

Many are aware that the world map we are used to does not reflect the real ratio of the areas of countries, and even more so seas and oceans. The use of the Mercator projection leads to the appearance of many distortions, when, for example, Greenland looks larger than Australia … A fundamentally new projection, proposed by Japanese designers, made it possible to build the most accurate map of the world that humanity has ever seen.

The traditional world map is built in the old way, in which the image from the surface of the globe is transferred to a flat map using the Mercator projection. As a result, we get on the map Greenland several times larger than Australia, while in fact Greenland is three times smaller.

But the map, built according to the principles of the AuthaGraph projection, can be called really innovative! Here the proportions of land and water remain unchanged and correspond to what we see on the globe. AuthaGraph received the prestigious Japanese Good Design Award for this development.

The author of the new revolutionary projection is Hajime Narukawa. The essence of his idea is that the spherical surface of the globe is divided into 96 triangles.

Then comes the original process of transferring the image onto a plane by combining various methods of projection through intermediate objects. This "layered display" reduces the number of errors and monstrous distortions that occur when the surface of the globe is traditionally unfolded into a flat map.