Map Monday: Playing with map locations and “real” country sizes

It was way back in 1569 when Flemish geographer and philosopher Gerardus Mercator created a new map projection, one that allows navigators to know where they are in the world along straight lines of latitude and longitude in 2 dimensions (when the world is inconveniently in 3 dimensions).  It was a remarkable breakthrough nearly 500 years ago, and it remains our most familiar map projection today, the Mercator projection, complete with gigantic Greenland.

We’ve seen lots of maps showing what the sizes of countries are really like in relation to each other, sizes which are increasingly distorted on the Mercator projection as you get farther away from the equator. Thanks to Bored Panda, I’ve learned about a neat online tool, found at thetruesize.com, that let’s you play with countries on a map, moving them to new locations to see how their sizes really compare. I’ll let the examples used by Bored Panda show you the kind of fun you can have playing with this tool. You might even want to give thetruesize.com a try yourself!