The True Size Of Africa

The earth is round. Big news, these days, but the trick is – and has always been – to display the 3D image of the world’s surface as a map in only 2D. The highly distorted view (Think of your rearview mirror’s warning: Objects may be closer than they appear) of the widely used mapping projection (e.g. Mercator) “shrinks” the equatorial regions and “stretches” polar regions. In fact, the continent of Africa is big enough to contain the USA, China, India, Japan and all of Europe – combined!