It is a logarithmic plot showing many different orders of magnitude in country size. The further the countries are from the 1:1 line the greater the overestimate of their size from the Mercator (also color coded to be red). This next graph shows each country plotted with their actual land area and apparent land area as shown on a Mercator projection. You can see this clearly in the northern ends of Russsia and Greenland, where the tops get smushed down. stretched out from a north-south perspective relative to parts of countries that are further from the poles. This means that the parts of countries that are nearer the poles will get taller, i.e. Similarly, the latitude lines also get further apart on a Mercator projection, while on a globe they stay equidistant. As a clear example, see what happens to the southern part of Australia, relative to the northern end. Since longitude lines converge at the poles, but are parallel on a Mercator, the closer a part of a country is to the poles, the more that part will get stretched wider relative to a part of a country that is not as close to the poles. Also important is that the closer you are to the poles, the more the distortion when a country is shown on the Mercator projection. This is why Greenland, Russia and Canada shrink so much in height and width in the animation, they are fairly high in latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. This is one of the major issues with a projection of a globe onto a cylinder area. It is formed by projecting the globe onto a cylinder A variant of the was adopted by Google maps, which helped establish it as the informal standard for web-based maps (although Google maps now also uses a globe view, instead of a map projection when zooming out to a very wide view).Īreas far from the equator are distorted in terms of their distances and are shown much larger than they actually are. The mercator projection is a commonly used projection on computer maps because it has perpendicular latitude and longitude lines (forming rectangles). It was inspired by a similar animation that I saw on reddit and decided I wanted to try to build the same thing. Pressing on the button animates the country ‘shrinking’ to its actual size or ‘growing’ to the size shown on the mercator projection. The map above shows the distortion in sizes of countries due to the mercator projection.
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