The Globe on a Piece of Paper

As a child, many people had a terrestrial globe at home. It was also present in the geography room at school. And the ratio of the sizes of countries, continents, and our planet on this globe is CORRECT. Over the years, the appearance of the globe is forgotten, and in adulthood we are often accompanied by a map where these dimensions are DISTORTED.

This is done in accordance with the traditions laid down by the Flemish cartographer and geographer Gerard Mercator. In 1569 he created a navigational map of the world on 18 sheets of paper where he applied the equiangular cylindrical projection used back in 1511, so angles and shapes are not distorted on the map, and distances are preserved only at the equator. Thus, Gerard Mercator solved an important problem of his time: to transfer our spherical world to a sheet of paper as accurately as possible.

The map he created shows the correct outlines of land plots, but it has large distortions of their sizes. The projection does not preserve the true proportions: the more northerly a continent, island, or country is located, the larger their outlines look on the map relative to the real size.

At the beginning of the 21st century these distortions were corrected by the British scientist Neil Kaye. He created a two-dimensional map that accurately shows the true ratio of the size of countries or continents. Neil entered information about the area of each country into the Ggplot data visualization program and applied the stereographic design method: he processed the images obtained using the stereography function, which projects a sphere onto a plane. The map designed by Neil Kaye brought back to all of us the globe from childhood – only in two-dimensional format:

Both the school globe and the map by Neil Kaye remind us that:

• Russia (which is the largest country in the world) is almost 2 times smaller than Africa;

• USA is almost 2 times smaller than South America;

• USA without Alaska is almost equal to Australia;

• Greenland is almost 14 times smaller than Africa;

• Brazil is almost 5 times bigger than Alaska;

• India is almost 4 times larger than the Scandinavian countries combined (Denmark, Norway, Sweden).