The UK is even smaller than we think

aslco

aslco

aslco

Soldato
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As some of you may be aware, the UK never looks quite as small as it actually is on maps because of the Mercator projection, the fact we're a weird shape and the fact that we're centrally placed.

This website is pretty cool for comparing other countries with us and giving perspective, but i still think it has the Mercator projection problem. For instance, i don't think many would realise metropolitan France is over twice the land area of the UK, and if we were an African country, we'd be about the size of uganda (UK is 244,000 KM2 and Uganda is 241,038 km2)

It's strange to think that it takes 3 hours to drive from south west wales to north east wales, yet how small it is!

The whole point being made was that we all have been taught geography mainly based on the Mercator projection - as the background in daily television news, the cover of my school atlas, in general the ubiquitous depiction of the planet.

But the basic fact is that a three-dimensional sphere being shown as a single two-dimensional flat image will always be subject to a conversion loss: something has to give…

The reason why Mercator was such an important advance is simple: on it one can draw straight lines to account for travel routes - in the days of the gigantic merchant fleets and naval battles an immensely valuable attribute.

But that ability to use lines instead of curves came at a cost: areas near the poles would be greatly exaggerated. Greenland looks deceivingly as if it were the size of all of South America for instance…

In other words: if things are normal near the equator, everything further north and south is familiar to us in a stretched and enlarged version, veering further and further away from the proper size. And conversely: if we kept the shapes as we intuitively know them now, Africa ought to be stretched massively larger to keep it in true proportion.

Hence the fact that in everyday thinking, Africa is just about always hugely underestimated - even by college grads, off by factor of 2 or 3
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I always knew how small Ireland is when you realise it will fit within the borders of the state of South Carolina. In general shape it's not a perfect fit, but if you broke off the bits that extend outside the borders and put them into the left over free space, it fits snug.
 
The whole of Northern Ireland fits inside the Nile delta...

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new numa hey said:
Relax.
Hes just presenting us the tool, thats all.
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*Looks at thread title* - That's not the impression I got.

The website is absolutely dire, but the actual tool is mildly useful if you don't already appreciate relative areas of various countries etc, but I think a lot of people already know how small the UK is..
 
MichaelAwkward said:
Obvious facts are obvious... I don't understand OP. Did people think the UK was a big country or something?
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I think its easy to forget about a size of a country especially one like England in modern society with how scalable and immersive social media has become not to mention the popularity of our heritage as a nation draws a lot of attention and all of these factors make you naturally feel like you part of something bigger than it is IMO.
 
Is it me or is that website horrendously confusing to use? It took me 5mins to figure out how to do it. I was all ready to congratulate them on making a Google-esque map where you can just drag a country or state onto another -- I've been looking for one of those for ages.
 
We are indeed a tiny place, but then you can tell that just by our perspective on things - to us a 90 minute drive is a trek, even 30 mins on a regular basis is an inconvenience, yet to Americans a 90 min drive is a little jaunt and even 6 hours is fine journey for a weekend getaway.
 
Scam said:
Is it me or is that website horrendously confusing to use? It took me 5mins to figure out how to do it. I was all ready to congratulate them on making a Google-esque map where you can just drag a country or state onto another -- I've been looking for one of those for ages.
Click to expand...

Might have been too complex to move country outlines with a drag as it recalculates the size of the outline depending on where in the world it is. You can see it 'refreshing' the outline when you move it using the arrows.
 
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