The World Actually Looks Very Different From How It’s Represented On A Traditional Map

THE GOOD NEWS:

The world is both a bigger place and a smaller place than you probably previously thought it to be.

A video created in 2016 by RealLifeLore shows the Earth is actually different from how it’s depicted on traditional maps. The simple reason is this: The Earth is a sphere and that means it is impossible to accurately depict its surface on a two-dimensional map.

The traditional map we all used in school is known as a Mercator projection. According to RealLifeLore, it’s “actually a really useful map for navigation and on keeping the correct shape of countries,” but it fails to accurately represent the actual size of countries in relation to one another.

To put things simply, on the Mercator projection, the further a country is from the equator, the greater its size is exaggerated. Conversely, the closer an object is to the equator, the more its size is diminished. So a country like Greenland appears to be much larger than it actually is, while Brazil is not as small as you might think.

To explore the real size of countries yourself, check out The True Size.