A few member of our team our West Wing fans and this clip blew there mind! Why on earth would all the maps we were familiarised with growing up be portrayed not to scale?
Before this clip if someone said these countries could all fit into Africa, I would of said your mad! Well here is the list of countries; China, United States, Western Europe, India, Argentina, three Scandinavian countries and the British Isles.
Apparently its all down to the difficulty representing a sphere on a flat plane without distortion, which means all map projections distort in one way or another. However to the people in the know their has been a massive debate in which map best represents the world and finally it seems the tide is changing towards Peters Map over the Mercator Projection which was drafted mainly for navigation and not to truly represent the land mass of countries.
Academics and people who educate themselves (also known as conspiracy theorists?) have claimed we have been taught the Mercator Projection map so we feel Western and Northern countries have much larger and physical presence in our world… I think it might be linked to that famous saying ‘size matters‘.. haha..
Food for thought:
The true size of Africa is mind blowing:
The map we grew up with:
Peters map to scale:
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