The map of the world
is a lot stranger than you think it is,
especially this map. You've probably seen it a lot in
classrooms or office buildings. But this map is extremely,
very badly wrong. As we can all hopefully agree
upon, the Earth is a sphere. And that means that it is
impossible to accurately depict her surface on a
two-dimensional map. This particular common map is
called the Mercator Projection. And if you'd like to experiment
with countries for yourself, please go to this website
called TheTrueSize.com after this video to see
what I'm talking about. Let's take the US state
of Wyoming as an example. Under the assumption
that Wyoming is actually a real place and not a
land full of tumbleweeds with a population less
than downtown Baltimore, this example will
work perfectly because of the state's square shape. As we stack one unit of
Wyoming on top of each other, we get more and more distorted
as we approach the North Pole, to the point where we
don't even really recognize it's familiar,
boring shape anymore. When we move our
Wyoming stack south, they get more squished together
as we approach the equator. This will happen with every
other landmass in the world. But first, let's take a look
at some other US states. They say that everything
is bigger in Texas. But what is Texas
itself bigger than? Moving the borders
over to Europe, the answer may surprise you. Texas is much bigger
than Spain and Portugal put together and is also
even bigger than France. But Texas is only the second
biggest US state behind Alaska, which seems
absolutely gargantuan at the top of our map. But while Alaska is large,
it isn't that large. Taken down to the US mainland,
it compares like this. And taking it to Europe,
it looks like this. And while we're here
in Europe, let's take the time to understand
how much bigger Europe seems than what it actually should be. Let's start by taking
France and moving it down to Africa to get our
first glimpse at this. The United Kingdom seems
pretty large as well. But let's take India
and move it over to see just how
small it really is. The United Kingdom
is actually smaller than quite a lot of
places in the world that you might
not expect, places like Japan, the Philippines,
Sumatra, Madagascar, and New Zealand. Next door to New
Zealand is Australia, and the UK looks so small
just off the east coast in comparison. And Australia, in
fact, is much bigger than most people
believe it to be. It can be placed to cover almost
the entire continental US. Interestingly, the combination
of the following countries will not cover that same area--
Portugal, the Netherlands, Estonia, Albania,
Hungary, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Austria, Croatia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Serbia,
Switzerland, Slovakia, Lithuania, Denmark, Ireland,
Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, the United Kingdom, Italy,
Germany, France, Spain, and Norway. And that's not even factoring
in big but not too big Alaska to the north. Between Alaska and
the United States is Canada, which also
seems huge up here. And while Canada is
a very large country, it's actually roughly
the same size as China but still looks
like a colossus when placed in Europe, where it
stretches from east to west to Portugal to Iran and up
north into the Barents Sea just above Russia. Slightly off topic-- Japan
is another bigger place than most people
believe it to be. If Japan were placed
off the US East Coast, it would look like
this in comparison. But much, much bigger than
Japan and also not often thought about is Brazil, which is an
absolutely massive country. It doesn't really look
like it on our map. But when we move
it to Australia, we can actually discover that
Brazil is much bigger, which makes Brazil larger than one of
the world's seven continents. Brazil is also almost larger
than the United States, spans almost all of Europe, but fits
rather snugly into Africa. We are about to discover that
Africa is a colossal continent that we don't often realize. It can almost fit the
entire contiguous United States into just
the Sahara Desert, and the continent
can also squeeze in China, Western
Europe, India, Argentina, Scandinavia, and the UK and
still have some room left over. Russia is another
place that looks pretty big at the top of the map. But drop it down next
to Africa, she also seems much smaller than what our
map was telling us beforehand. While we're still
here in Africa, the Democratic
Republic of the Congo used to be a colony of Belgium. But Belgium, in comparison,
looks like this. Finally, we need to look at
a few other places on the map to the north and the south. Let's start with
Sweden, which looks big. But comparing it to
Madagascar, again, we see that it actually isn't. Iceland also seems
like a large island, but it's actually roughly
the same size as Tasmania just south of Australia. And finally, we have
the white elephant in the room of
Greenland, which towers like a behemoth of
the top of the map. Greenland masquerades as being
a continent in her own right, looking bigger than
Australia, South America, and being comparable
to North America. But in reality, Greenland
is much, much smaller. The globe reveals Greenland to
be the island that she pretends that she isn't. And we get a much more
accurate depiction this time when we compare her to
Australia, South America, and North America. And of course, we can't forget
about the most shy continent in the world that
everybody always forgets about-- Antarctica,
who spends her time hiding away at the bottom of the map. Most people don't truly
have a good understanding of the size of Antarctica,
which could probably go either way between being
larger or smaller than you think. But the truth is Antarctica
is a huge continent. It is much bigger
than Australia. It can stretch all the
way from Kiev to Uganda and, incredibly, can be placed
between the southernmost tip of Texas in the United States
and stretched all the way into the northernmost
islands of Canada. There are many more
examples like this, but you have probably
understood the point by now. The world is both a bigger
place and a smaller place than you previously
thought it to be. Leave your comments
below saying what you found to be the most
interesting or another crazy fact you may have discovered
or already knew on your own. You can check out
this brilliant website that I used as a resource for
making this video over here at TheTrueSize.com. And I hope that you'll
subscribe to my channel by clicking here if you're
interested in watching more content like
this in the future. As always, this
was RealLifeLore.
This topic is like Hello World for informational videos
The Mercador projection isn't wrong. Its goal isn't to show the true scale of the world's features, it's a navigational map. A straight line on the Mercador projection is a line of constant bearing.
edit: I'll rephrase this because I sort of said it wrong. Let's say you have a Mercator map and are plotting your course from Portugal to Virginia. If you draw a straight line and measure the angle, it'll be something like 190 degrees. If you take out your compass and sail in the direction of 190 degrees the whole way, you will wind up in Virginia. You can't do this on maps that don't preserve true bearing.
All that production and doesn't mention landmass numbers once.
So you want to make a youtube informational channel.
Step 1) Make a video about maps that has been done a thousand or more times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_area
Done – unnecessary video which was uninformative and a little US-centric imo.
Would have rather seen other projections than 1000 iterations on "look how big this is compared to that!"
I don't understand. He is using a deceiving style of map projection to illustrate that certain countries are not scaled properly.
How is it logical to show that a certain country is not as big as we think it is... by overlaying it on yet another country that is not accurately projected.
For example he says Canada isn't as big as the Mercator projection leads us to believe. But later, to show how big Antartica is he lays it over North America. But... isn't North America not accurately projected?
I'm so sick of these videos. There's so many.
No, my mind isn't blown. No the world doesn't look different than I think.
Because I've seen a fucking globe.
Have nobody ever seen a fucking globe?
literally nothing surprised me about this video. i felt it was horrible. and this may even be my first comment on reddit. idfk... this video sucked.