Do you know how big Africa is?
December 4th, 2008 | by Digvijay Lamba |I have been reading Michael Crichton’s novel Congo and have been struck by the sheer magnitude of the size of Africa as a continent and my view of it.
Africa is larger than North America and Europe combined, almost twice the size of South America. Ofcourse, the standard world map does not show it to be anywhere near that big. This is because we use what is called the Mercator Projection in most standard maps, including in Google maps. As the earth is really a sphere, projecting into a flat rectangular map causes the features to get twisted.
This projection however doesn’t preserve the actual area of the countries and continents and the countries farther from the equator are shown to be much larger. This is an artifact of the importance of the European countries in the middle of this millennium, this projection shows them to be much larger than they really are.
Two projections of the world that preserve this area are: Gall-Peters Projection and the Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection. Looking at one of these clearly shows how big Africa and for that matter Australia really are and how small Greenland is compared to how it looks in our maps.
The gall peters projection:
Tags: Africa, Continents, Interesting, Map Projections, Maps, Travel
2 Responses to “Do you know how big Africa is?”
By Ridhima on Dec 4, 2008 | Reply
This is interesting!
By Vipul Sharma on Dec 21, 2008 | Reply
since the day you mentioned this I was continuously thinking where I read and heard about it. Today I remember that there was an episode in West Wing about it. Check it out http://odtmaps.com/what_they_are_saying/west-wing.asp