Why is greenland gigantic on a mercator projection

Instead, the choice of the projection will depend on the use of the map. The most popular projection, the Mercator projection Fig. The cylinder is then unrolled to produce a flat map that preserves the shapes of landmasses but tends to stretch countries towards the poles. This is why the size of Greenland is exaggerated in many world maps. If Google Maps and other web mapping services rely on the Mercator projection, it is not to make countries at high latitudes appear bigger, but, because those tools are mainly intended to be used at local scales.

The fact that the Mercator projection preserves angles and shapes therefore ensures minimal distortions at the city-level: two perpendicular streets will always appear perpendicular in Google Maps. This is not necessarily the case at high latitudes with projections that preserves areas as can be seen here. Click here to display content from YouTube. Always display content from YouTube.

The cylinder is then unrolled to produce a flat map that preserves the shapes of landmasses but tends to stretch countries towards the poles. This is why the size of Greenland is exaggerated in many world maps. In the Mercator Projection as you get further from the equator the landmasses become larger and larger compared to how they would accurately be projected.

This means that Antarctica and Greenland look much larger than they should appear. The Robinson projection is a map projection of a world map which shows the entire world at once.

It was specifically created in an attempt to find a good compromise to the problem of readily showing the whole globe as a flat image. The Robinson projection is neither conformal nor equal-area. It generally distorts shapes, areas, distances, directions, and angles.

The distortion patterns are similar to common compromise pseudocylindrical projections. Advantage: The Robinson map projection shows most distances, sizes and shapes accurately. Disadvantage: The Robinson map does have some distortion around the poles and edges.

Unlike the Mercator projection, the Robinson projection has both the lines of altitude and longitude evenly spaced across the map. Disadvantages: Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite.

So, for example, Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger relative to land masses near the equator than they actually are. It replaces the traditional Mercator map style that many of us are familiar with. The Gall-Peters map shows the correct sizes of countries, but it also distorts them. East—west and north—south directions could be represented with fidelity, and the distortions in size became gross only near the polar regions rendering Greenland, for example, disproportionately large.

Click to see full answer Keeping this in consideration, why does Greenland look so big on maps? Distortion of sizes As on all map projections, shapes or sizes are distortions of the true layout of the Earth's surface. The Mercator projection exaggerates areas far from the equator. Greenland appears the same size as Africa, when in reality Africa's area is 14 times greater. Yes, Greenland is huge. But not this huge. Because it's so close to the North Pole, the Mercator projection stretches the Danish-controlled island out beyond all proportion.

That's why it looks as big as Africa and a lot bigger than the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On the Mercator map, shown below, Greenland appears almost the same size as Africa. Created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in , the Mercator projection preserves direction, instead of size , making it useful for navigation.

Africa is smaller than Greenland on most world maps you see for the simple reason that most flat world maps use the Mercator projection, created by Gerardus Mercator in Obviously, Antarctica isn't really bigger than Eurasia and Africa is 14 times larger than Greenland, not smaller as this map suggests. Greenland is about 3 times bigger than Texas. Texas is approximately , sq km, while Greenland is approximately 2,, sq km. We have positioned the outline of Texas near the middle of Greenland.

This is hands-down the most accurate map projection in existence. In fact, AuthaGraph World Map is so proportionally perfect, it magically folds it into a three-dimensional globe.

Japanese architect Hajime Narukawa invented this projection in by equally dividing a spherical surface into 96 triangles. Unfortunately, there isn't a strict scientific definition of a continent. China is around the same size as Canada.