Size Comparison of any Countries

[Yora]

Now this (https://thetruesize.com) is a really fun tool.

Even if you understand that mercator projection is ridiculus and that other world maps also make countries near the poles seem larger, being able to compare any countries you like really puts things in a different perspective. Especially Africa is just absolutely massive. Congo is the size of Greenland and Madagascar the size of Sweden. That's very hard to compare even on a globe when you can't look at two sides of the world at the same time.

[Wardog]

Neat tool.

This reminds me of something that's been puzzling me for a while thought:

Are Mercator projection maps ubiquitous in America?

I keep seeing articles on various social media platforms from American sources, with subjects like "You won't believe what the world really looks like", all condemning the Mercator projection as "wrong" (and probably racist as well), and usually pushing the Peter's projection as the correct alternative. They invariably treat it as though noone will have been aware of any problems with (or alternatives to) Mercator.

Now, in the UK, I was taught about map projections and their advantages and disadvantages (and that Mercator isn't really usueful for anything except navigation) in middle-school. Furthermore, I don't actually see it used very often. And this isnt even a new "politically correct" development. I've got an old atlas published at the height of the colonial era, which starts with two polar projections and two equal-area world maps (Mollweide Homolographic) before it has a Mercator map, and then all the local/regional maps are in other projections appropriate to the area.

[Eldan]

I was wondering about that too. When I see a world map, it's usually Robinson or Winkel-Tripel or something like that. Mercator is rare, from what I know. Is that an American thing? (Gall-Peters is worse. I've only ever seen that come up in discussions of American politics.)

[Yora]

Elipticals are most common here in Germany, though I sometimes see Merkator on poster maps (as decoration for the plebs). But even with most of the eliptical ones you still get pretty bad distortion of size.

On top of that, you also always have difficulties with reference points. Europe and Africa are of very different sizes, so most times you see a "map of Europe" and a "map of Africa", they will be in completely different scales. When you have both continents side by side, it tends to be at a scale where individual countries blur together into a smudge, and then Germany is way too far away from Ghana to compare without holding a ruler to them.
I always asumed the countries on the western African coast are very small, but they turn out to be about the same size as the average countries in Europe. Is just that the rest of the countries in Africa are simply huge.

[Astral Avenger]

Having gone through the US public school system in Minnesota in the early 2000s, most of my classroom maps were Mercator or Robinson projections (may have been Hobo-Dyer or Plate Carree instead of Mercator, not really sure). I certainly was never taught about the relative merits of the different projections in school, but learned a fair amount from researching the parts of Northern Canada I'd go on canoe trips in the summer and trying to figure out why the maps of the same area looked so different from each other.

[Knaight]

Europe in general is really tiny, and it comes across when dragging. Ethiopia is bigger than every country in Europe but Russia, Yemen looks downright huge when dragged up, Thailand (drawn so small on maps) is clearly bigger than most of the countries.

Heck, even Nepal is pretty sizeable by Europe standards.

[LordEntrails]

Awesome. Thank you. I have been looking for something like this for years.

I live in the southwest US, and how many time I've talked to people for the eastern US who just don't get how big the states are out west. And I had a friend visit from Germany who was amazed by the vast open spaces. His whole country is about the size of one of the western states.

Such a difference and this is a great tool to visualize. Thanks again. Bookmarked!

[Mechalich]

Are Mercator projection maps ubiquitous in America?


The Mercator projection is the most commonly used projection for GIS data in the United States, so yes, it is pretty ubiquitous. For maps focusing on a relatively small regions (like the Southeast US or smaller) the projection is quite effective, well understood, and easy to utilize, so there's a lot of inertia.

[Gnoman]

When I was in school, they explained that all projections are junk, most distort shapes a lot more than Mercator/Robinson, and to just use a globe if we needed to avoid distortion.

[Eurus]

That is pretty interesting! I knew Mercator was distorted, but I never quite realized just how extreme the effects on places like Canada and Russia are. The weird insistence that some sources seem to have on comparing Africa as a continent to the size of individual countries kinda throws me, though?

[factotum]

The weird insistence that some sources seem to have on comparing Africa as a continent to the size of individual countries kinda throws me, though?

In the traditional Mercator projection, Greenland looks to be about the same size as Africa, so that seems reasonable to me. You can easily see it's much smaller than that using this site--in fact, it's slightly smaller than Algeria, which is just one of the countries in Africa!

[Yora]

Awesome. Thank you. I have been looking for something like this for years.

I live in the southwest US, and how many time I've talked to people for the eastern US who just don't get how big the states are out west. And I had a friend visit from Germany who was amazed by the vast open spaces. His whole country is about the size of one of the western states.

Such a difference and this is a great tool to visualize. Thanks again. Bookmarked!

By West European standards, America is also almost unpopulated. If you would move the entire population of the US to Texas and New Mexico, those two states would be about as densely populated as Germany.

[halfeye]

Monaco vs Lichtenstein?

[LordEntrails]

By West European standards, America is also almost unpopulated. If you would move the entire population of the US to Texas and New Mexico, those two states would be about as densely populated as Germany.
Yep.

One of the things I find interesting is not just the comparisons between the continents, but within just the US itself their are major cultural perceptions about distances, mostly between the east and west. For instance, when I visit relatives in the northeast, we would make "big plans" to go visit the other relatives in the area because it was a 45 minute drive and would take you through several "towns". So it wasn't something you just did, you had to plan for it. Yet, I drove 45 minutes each way to highschool and that was only half-way across town, and a 1:45 to go to the next major city wasn't that big of a deal.

I remember talking with a long-term customer about this years ago, his wife's family was coming out to visit them in Albuquerque, NM and listed all these places they wanted to visit in New Mexico during the 3 day visit. When he saw the list from them, he said, "You realize you want to drive 700 miles this weekend?" They were like, "but it's all in state..."

This tool lets you take one of the four corner states and drop it over the New England and gives you a since of size :)

[factotum]

By West European standards, America is also almost unpopulated. If you would move the entire population of the US to Texas and New Mexico, those two states would be about as densely populated as Germany.

This does depend on the state, though. According to Wikipedia there are 9 US states and dependencies with a higher population density than Germany--Maryland, American Samoa, Connecticut, Guam, US Virgin Islands, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Puerto Rico, and New Jersey. District of Columbia is way higher too, but that's almost entirely city so it's not surprising it has a high population density.

[Lord Torath]

That is a pretty sweet tool! Thanks for sharing it!

We primarily used Mercator projections in school (30+ years ago, and man is that depressing to type!), but learned about several others, and how size was drastically distorted as you moved away from the Equator (Greenland is larger than all of South America!) in the Mercator. Mercator is/was favored because it preserves the shape of the land masses fairly well, until you get really close to the poles. The evening news program growing up had a Goode homolosine projection on the backdrop, which preserves land mass size and shape fairly well, but distorts the oceans.

[sktarq]

One of the things I find interesting is not just the comparisons between the continents, but within just the US itself their are major cultural perceptions about distances, mostly between the east and west. For instance, when I visit relatives in the northeast, we would make "big plans" to go visit the other relatives in the area because it was a 45 minute drive and would take you through several "towns". So it wasn't something you just did, you had to plan for it. Yet, I drove 45 minutes each way to highschool and that was only half-way across town, and a 1:45 to go to the next major city wasn't that big of a deal..... "but it's all in state..."....
I'm from California but went to school in the East for a while and ended up in the UK for a good while too. And the lack of sense of distances in the west shocked me. The idea that there is a "state" as a unit of meassure of distance or scale for many people blew my mind. The distance between San Diego and San Francisco is roughly the distance from the Isle of Wight to Glasgow or Edinburgh so the UK actually had a better sense of scale of California than the people of the East Coast did.

But this tool....New comparison...Raleigh North Carolina to Portland Maine



as Mercator being common in the US. I didn't really see it very often growing up in the 80's and 90's the massive size of Antarctica in Mercator would stand out as really odd when I did see it. Most of the time the teachers didn't seem to know what projections the maps were and would call them Mercator if it was a rectangular map.

[Lord Torath]

It should be pointed out that the US does not have a standard education system across the entire country. Each state gets to determine its own standards, and within those standards, individual teachers have a fair bit of leeway. Plus, those standards change over time. So it's hard to generalize much about a "typical" education in the US.

[Vinyadan]

Monaco vs Lichtenstein?

Liechtenstein should be larger, it's a valley vs a city. Monaco has a few more people, though.

[Serpentine]

One of the things I find interesting is not just the comparisons between the continents, but within just the US itself their are major cultural perceptions about distances, mostly between the east and west. For instance, when I visit relatives in the northeast, we would make "big plans" to go visit the other relatives in the area because it was a 45 minute drive and would take you through several "towns". So it wasn't something you just did, you had to plan for it. Yet, I drove 45 minutes each way to highschool and that was only half-way across town, and a 1:45 to go to the next major city wasn't that big of a deal.
I've noticed something similar in Australia, but I think it's more a country vs city thing. Where I went to high school, it'd be 30-40 minutes to get to the next town of any significant size. My mum would drive there and back, but it always seemed like a pretty long way, and if we went on the weekend it was a day trip.
Now I live in the city, and it's a 30-40 minute trip by public transport from home to the CBD, and by car to get to some friends' places a few suburbs over.

[Max_Killjoy]

Drop Michigan and the Great Lakes over anywhere, and think about how much water that is.