Cape Town – Did you know that the African continent has a land area of 30.37 million sq km — enough to fit in the US, China, India, Japan, Mexico and many European nations, combined.
So why do maps show countries like North America and China to be super enlarged, while Africa is made to look small?
Well, according to the website newscientist.com, the world map you are probably familiar – called the Mercator projection – was developed all the way back in 1569 and greatly distorts the relative areas of land masses.
Basically, the Mercator projection makes Africa look tiny, while Greenland and Russia appear to be rather large.
Research site Statista says that it’s not the fact that Africa is shown as being too small on the majority of world maps, it’s how almost every other part of the world has been artificially inflated.
Statista shows that cartographer Gerardus Mercator devised a solution to the problem of representing a globe on a 2D map's surface back in the 1500s, but exponentially distorted the globe map.
Even though Mercator’s projection was considered revolutionary and invaluable for nautical navigation, however, in the modern era, researchers say that this method is largely outdated and wildly inaccurate.
In 2015, Scientific American published a correctly proportioned image to show how Africa swallows up these nations, with Japan thrown in.
Furthermore, it also turns out that Saudi Arabia has more area than France, Spain, Germany, Poland and Italy together, writes the research website.
IOL