Something Very Wrong With The World Map

Have you ever looked at the world map and admired the work of the cartographer? It’s amazing how the whole world gets depicted on a piece of paper with such accuracy, isn’t it? Well, it is actually not at all accurate. No offence to the inventors of maps but it is true that the world map doesn’t accurately show the size of all the countries and the continents properly.

The map that we are accustomed to is called the Mercator Projection. While it is impossible to represent the Earth’s surface on a 2-D plane, the Mercator projection is somehow able to depict the map in a rather peculiar manner. The peculiar thing that the continents at the top of the map are actually smaller than they appear while for the continents in the lower half, it is the other way round.

These maps follow the principle of Mercator’s Wyoming Law. In the law, Wyoming(A state in the US) has been taken as an example to show the maps’ fault. According to the law, as we place stacks of the sizes identical to that of Wyoming, one over the other, we would have an irregular figure on the map.

This law has resulted in a lot of shape errors in the map. For example, in the map, the UK looks quite big as compared to India, but if the map of India is actually placed over UK, India is found to be way bigger.

There are a lot of errors like these in the world map which go unnoticed. We can take the example of Australia. Although it already is depicted large enough, it is larger than what the people expect it to be. If the map of Australia is put over the US, it can cover the whole continental US. For better business growth, try Real Estate CRM Software.

There are much more examples like these mentioned in the following video. Let us know if you have observed any of them.

Note: All the images used in this article are taken from this youtube video