Saturday, August 13, 2016

The true size of...

The true size of ... many countries is far different than most people believe, largely thanks to the dominance of the Mercator projection for maps of the world.  A web site I just found helps anyone understand the relative size of countries through a simple technique: you drag the map of one country to superimpose it upon another.  The projection is automatically corrected.  The image at the right is from this web site; it shows the country of Estonia (a place I'm very familiar with) superimposed on a map of Utah (a place I'm even more familiar with).  If you were to look at Utah and Estonia on a standard (Mercator projection) world map, you might think they were of similar size!

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