The world map is familiar sight on classroom walls and in atlases, but in terms of country and continent size, it’s way off – and all because of a 16th-century projection.

Have you ever looked at a world map and wondered why some countries seem much larger than others, even though that doesn't ...

The visualization clearly reveals how landmasses near the poles in the Mercator projection appear much larger than they actually are, relative to those nearer the equator. For example: Antarctica ...

And Canada, as another example, is in fact very close to the ... The video description does note that not all is bad about the Mercator projection: “it’s actually a really useful map for ...

The Mercator projection, for example, depicts local shapes well but distorts the surface areas near the North and South Poles to the point that the polar regions are often chopped off. In 2007 ...

In the US and Germany, for example, maps based on the so-called Winkel Tripel projection, which has a smaller skewness, started to replace the Mercator in the 1920s.

For example, Greenland and Africa are shown ... And despite the controversy, the Mercator projection is still one of the most ...

Greenland, for example, is shown to be relatively the same size as ... looking to support a projection that better represents the Global South. The Mercator projection is the most commonly used map ...

A map showing how small some countries really are has left people shocked. Reddit users have been surprised by a map showing the real size of countries was posted on the site, in the week after ...