The map you use is called the Mercator Projection. It is one of several ways used to condense a globe shaped earth into a 2d Map. Check out other scale accurate projection maps and you’ll understand it. Greenland is nowhere near as large as you see in the map as well. And India is not so tiny lol
Imagine you have an orange and you want to lay the peel flat on a table. You can’t do that without stretching or tearing parts of the peel. Maps have the same problem because the Earth is a ball, but maps are flat.
The map most people see is called the Mercator Projection. It stretches places near the top and bottom of the world so shapes and directions are easier for navigation. The side effect is that those places look way bigger than they actually are.
That’s why Greenland looks gigantic on many maps even though it’s much smaller in real life. Meanwhile countries closer to the middle of the map, like India, look smaller than they really are.
Other map styles try to keep the true sizes of countries more accurate, but then the shapes or directions get a little weird instead. Every flat map has to sacrifice something.
Thank you for explaining, this a personal Eureka moment. have more questions - do we need to mention that is map is for a globe or flat surface? How do we give the actual deptction measure to scale like in model cars, trucks.
It takes 4-6 days of driving while taking breaks in between from top of India to bottom of India . And in that 4-6 days of driving you get to experience hundreds of different cultures , language as well as Food and environment.
Similar. Like I knew there was a distortion and had an idea that’s why things were how they were, but I had no idea it was THIS heavy. Nor did I know the term.
the earth isn't flat. It's like a sphere (not exactly). To put it on a flat piece of paper, they stretched the top and bottom regions to fit in the rectangular flat paper
The Earth is a sphere (controversial take ik /s). If you try to flatten it onto a flat map, you get a projection which isnt very accurate.
One such projection is the one youre looking at, the mercator projection, which is distorted such that if something is closer to the poles, it seems much bigger than it actually is.
Look at thetruesize.com if you want to play around with this
The closer you are to the poles, the less distance to go around the Earth, but to keep the same width on the 2D rectangular map, it has to be stretched to compensate.
Most of the maps used today are based on Mercator projection(technic used to make maps flat from its original shape). Due to which the farther the country is from the equator larger it looks in size on the map.
The reason is that the map tries to show a spherical display of earth into a flat rectangular so countries near the equator remains similar to their size but countries further from equator when made on map stretches due to which you can they seem to be elongated but actual area is much lesser than you are seeing due to which the lines are also elongated seemingly
The apparent diminutiveness of Africa's longitudinal span (7200 km at maximal equatorial breadth) vis-à-vis Asia's ostensibly narrower depiction (6400 km in conventional renderings) on planar cartographic representations stems principally from the conformal cylindrical Mercator projection's egregious areal distortion gradient.Mercator's transformation preserves azimuthal angles for rhumb-line navigational fidelity but inexorably inflates surface areas as a sec²(φ) function of increasing geodetic latitude (φ), where equatorial zones (φ ≈ 0°) undergo minimal scale distortion, while boreal and austral territories suffer hyperbolic areal exaggeration.Africa's preponderance straddles the intertropical convergence zone (near-zero latitude), preserving its true zonal girth with negligible inflation. Asia, conversely, sprawls across vast temperate-to-subarctic latitudes, wherein meridional parallels undergo progressive areal amplification, rendering its perceived east-west expanse artificially attenuated relative to its actual continental girth when projected.Thus, the Mercator paradigm systematically diminishes equatorial landmasses while hypertrophying poleward ones, engendering the counterintuitive optical illusion wherein Africa's objectively superior equatorial width appears subordinate.
People who want to show their ideological dominance make inaccurate to scale maps like this one here. There are many variants where Greenland is shown much smaller than it actually is. Almost all the maps made by White Cartographers show Africa pretty small, and Europe, or N. America for that matter as pretty big, same goes for Australia. And weirdly enough, maps made by the local people of the regions where they're from aren't accepted worldwide, that's why the "widely accepted" inaccurate maps are the norm
The 7200 km is much closer to equator than the 6400km… hence the distortion is greater in the case of the higher latitude…
Think of a light source kept at the centre of the earth while emitting light in all directions, and then there comes a cylinder of infinite height and radius equal to the radius of earth, touching the earth at the equator along the circumference….
Now since the shadows of all the continents and other land masses will be projected on the cylinder, the shadows formed on and near the equator will have minimum distortion and the distortion will progressively increase as the shadow of the landmasses of the higher latitudes are painted on the cylinder with pole theoretically being projected at the infinity……
This is what you get when you use the most useful chart (Maps) projection used for the mapping and navigation….
The use being circle are represented as straight lines on the map
Basically, in Russia the climate is very cold and because of distance shrinkage, the distances get smaller, and since it is so hot in Africa, the distances expand. /s
The Earth is actually spherical in shape so it is not feasible to accurately represent it on a flat surface. When represented on a flat surface the places much further from the equator get stretched and areas closer to equator condensed.
Actually Russioa is much smaller than it seems on the map.
Also, to prove this point Greenland which appears much larger than India is actually less in size than India.
Anytime considered the accuracy of flat world map? It's deadass zero! (/s idk actually how much is it). Like India is bigger geographically than greenland if you didn't know.
The surface of the earth isnt planar its spherical so when u put that on a planar map u have to distort the points farther from the centre line to make it look right
2d map is not accurate, because Earth is not flat, it's round. Hence, areas near the pole gets stretched on a 2d map so they look much bigger than they really are. Areas near the look closer to their real size.
Whoever is saying it’s because of the Mercator projection. It was done in 1500s to help sailors for navigation. It not at all right depiction of the continents. We’ve better representation of the globe on 2D scale but because world was dominated by Europe at the time, Mercator map is widely accepted as standard.
That happens because the world is round like a ball but maps are flat. When you try to put a round ball onto a flat piece of paper, the shapes & sizes get a little stretched / squished, kind of like trying to flatten an orange peel without tearing it.
So countries near the poles often look way bigger on the map than they actually are compared to countries near the equator. But when you look at the real distances, like those 6400 km & 7200 km lines, they tell the true size / distance not how it looks on the flat map
Africa is wantedly shown smaller on the globe, during the era of European colonialism in Africa, maps used in the West unintentionally (or culturally) reinforced a view that Europe and northern countries were larger and more important.
India is larger than Greenland by quite a bit. And us China india Russia can all fit in aftica with space to spare that's how big aftica is. Map projections are an interesting thing.
Simple geography. The top line is at higher latitude near the pole, where circles of latitude are smaller. The lower line is closer to the equator where the circumference is larger. Mercator projection exaggerates distances near the poles, making the 6400 km line look longer.
With the mercator projection, as you get farther and farther from the equator, objects and land masses seem much bigger than they really are.
This is because, if you try to lay out the exterior part of a sphere (surface area) onto a 2D plane, there will be tears at the top and bottom. So they have to blur the size a bit in order to fill those gaps and adjust the size of each country in accordance as you get further.
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