Met Office climate data scientist Neil Kayem studied the distortion of the Mercator map and created a two-dimensional representation of the Earth.
It is generally accepted that the total area of Greenland is 2.16 million square kilometers, but scientists say that this is far from the case. In addition, scientists have proven that the real area of Russia is also smaller than known. The Daily Mail writes about it.
According to scientists, this is due to the Mercator projection, which is often found in classrooms and geography textbooks. It was created in 1596 by the geographer Gerard Mercator and has the effect of the so-called distortion of the world map.
“The projection used by Murkarth gives the correct shape to the land masses, but distorts their size in favor of the lands to the north. One of the most striking examples is Canada and Russia – on the map of the world that they occupy almost a quarter of the Earth’s Surface, but in reality, only 5% of the surface of our planet. “Another interesting example is Australia, which seems smaller than Alaska, if in fact it is the sixth largest country in the world and 4.5 times the size of Alaska,” the researchers said.
They argue that the main problem is the impossibility of depicting the reality of a spherical globe on a flat surface.
For example, Neil Kayem, a climate data scientist at the Met Office, studied the distortion of the Mercator map and created a two-dimensional representation of the Earth.
According to the results, countries in the northern hemisphere are probably smaller than we think.
“In the course of the study, the scientist used Ggplot, which is a data visualization package for statistical programming, and entered into it the data from the Met Office at the real scale of the countries. After that, the researcher created a real map of our world using a stereographic projection that allows you to move the globe on the plane. All this allowed the climatologist another way to view the true size of countries, for example, according to the Mercator projection , North America looks the same size as Africa, and Greenland also seems comparable in size. But in fact, Africa is actually bigger than both – in fact, you can include North America, India, Argentina, Tunisia , and possibly others,” the study said.
Remember, the researchers said that the tectonic plates of Africa and Arabia collided in the desert and gradually separated for about 30 million years. According to them, the same movement divided the Red Sea.
Source: korrespondent
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