From Kai Krause, a map that puts Africa in perspective (click to enlarge):
Hat tip to Eric Green.
It vies with another of my favorite maps of the continent:
Another favorite is here.
Presentation to the Joint Chiefs Operations Directorate
November 11, 2022
5 Responses
Too bad Canada and Russia were left out of the mix!!
Just take a look at a map in mercator projection and compare Greenland to Africa… Greenland appears larger than Africa where it is only 1/15 the size in reality. Choosing a map projection can be a political decision. Choosing the mercator projection leads to bigger european and north american countries; countries closer to the equator appear smaller.
As most maps are made from an european/north american perspective, those lead to a wide spread misjudgement of relative sizes. And, of course, you can’t just take a part of a map and copy it to another part (as you can’t measure long distances or sizes on maps and some other things that can’t be done easily without further knowledge).
Where’s Alaska?
Hm. Great point. I think you might be right.
The first one is an excellent map, but it does suffer from one flaw. To my (untrained) eye, it appears that the outline of Africa and other countries uses a Mercator projection. So while it’s true that Africa is as big as those other countries put together, the *relative* size of the countries superimposed on African countries is not correct – for example, France and Germany together appear to be roughly the same size as Libya, or even bigger, when in fact, Libya has almost double the area of the two countries put together.