It answers the question no one has ever asked: “What would happen if you combined the US and Australia into some sort of weird hybrid country?”
Well we now have the answer.
Titled The United Stralia, it is a 50/50 US Australia blend.
The hidden text on the original reads: “This projection distorts both area and direction, but preserves Melbourne.”
It’s currently the 8th in a series of bad map projects (this one being labelled number #102).
Below is an explanation for this one and then the other 7 entries.
You can read a full explanation of the map from Explain XKCD here.
The states and territories of Australia are depicted with black lines/labels, while the states of the United States and such cities as are taken from either nation are marked with gray. The Australian states are labeled with their full names, but the American states are given only their postal abbreviations.
(Mississippi is mislabeled as MI, in addition to Michigan’s own correct usage, instead of the official MS.) Western Australia is usually abbreviated to WA, but the convention here leaves that unambiguously assigned to the US state of Washington.Idaho, for some reason, is not labeled at all, and neither is the Australian island state of Tasmania.
Geographical Relationships
From west to east, the Australian states and territories contain the following U.S. states; the positions of Australian cities on the map are also listed:
Western Australia contains the following U.S. states:
- Arizona
- California
- Perth appears on the California coast, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
- Colorado
- Idaho
- Montana
- Nevada
- New Mexico
- Oregon
- Utah
- Washington
- Wyoming
Northern Territory contains the following U.S. states:
- Illinois
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Michigan (Upper Peninsula)
- Minnesota
- Darwin is positioned in northwestern Minnesota.
- Missouri
- Nebraska
- North Dakota
- South Dakota
- Wisconsin
South Australia contains the following U.S. states:
- Arkansas
- Louisiana
- Adelaide is located in the Mississippi River delta region of Louisiana.
- Oklahoma
- Texas
- West Texas is now in the Eucla time zone (GMT+8h45), although it is on the wrong side of the bent WA/SA border
Queensland contains the following U.S. states and territories:
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Indiana
- Kentucky
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan (Lower Peninsula)
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New York
- North Carolina
- Brisbane is located on the coast in southeast North Carolina.
- Ohio
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- Tennessee
- Vermont
- Virginia
- West Virginia
New South Wales contains the following U.S. states:
- Alabama
- Georgia
- Canberra, and presumably the rest of the Australian Capital Territory, is located in southeastern Georgia.
- Mississippi
- South Carolina
- Sydney is located along the coast of South Carolina, near the location of Charleston.
Victoria and Tasmania combine to make up the U.S. state of Florida, which is now divided into two non-contiguous parts. As a result Tasmania, which has a history of being omitted from maps of Australia, is displayed but not named.
Melbourne is located in the southeast corner of Victorian Florida.
Although Tasmania’s largest city Hobart is not labeled, it could share the same general location of Miami on the map. Alaska and Hawaii, the two non-contiguous states of the United States, do not appear in the projection.
Other major geographic distortions include:
- The U.S. now has two quadripoints, with the intersection of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico joining the existing Four Corners.
- Indiana has a border with Arkansas.
- Alabama and Mississippi have lost Gulf Coast access, as Florida has a border with Louisiana.
- Missouri has a north-south border with Oklahoma.
- Miami is separated from the lower 48 states, as it is now located in the non-contiguous Tasmanian Florida.
2. Bad map projection #107: The Liquid Resize
And the hidden text for this one reads: “This map preserves the shapes of Tissot’s indicatrices pretty well, as long as you draw them in before running the resize.”
Explain XKCD gives the following explanation:
First, this method needs a planar map projection as its starting point, thus compounding the problems right off the bat.
Planar projections are relatively accurate near the center but heavily distorted toward the edges.
A famous example of a planar projection is the logo of the United Nations.
Planar projections are basically only useful for 3D graphics rendering, if the user needs a quick, inexpensive way to store map textures that will later be attached to a sphere.
Second, the map uses Photoshop’s content aware resizing tool, a very questionable choice.
The content aware resizing tool resizes images by identifying what it thinks are important details and preserving these, while shrinking or stretching less detailed areas.
For example, when used on a face, the algorithm detects that the eyes and mouth are important details and tries to keep these in place, while stretching the skin around it.
When applied to a map, this means that areas with lots of countries – and therefore lots of detail – such as Europe, West Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Central America/the Caribbean are relatively unchanged, while big countries like India, China and the US are very warped.
The choices that the resizing tool makes are also dependent on the exact visual features of the original map, such as the choice of not having any topography or infrastructure drawn on, or not including a latitude/longitude grid, so what areas are deemed as unimportant is even more arbitrary than it would be on, say, a photographic picture of the Earth.
3. Bad map projection #79: Time Zones
The hidden text reads: “This is probably the first projection in cartographic history that can be criticized for its disproportionate focus on Finland, Mongolia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
From Explain XKCD:
This comic shows a map projection in which countries are placed according to the time zones that they fall under. It seems that Randall, being Randall, runs with the idea as he has made yet another map projection that is not only inaccurate, but utterly unusable, though less so than the previous one.
They also give a full list of all distortions. They also have some interesting trivia:
Errors
- Mixing labels:
- Randall mixes up Morocco and Western Sahara (a disputed territory)
- Suriname and French Guiana also have switched labels.
- Wrong time zones:
- East Thrace, the European portion of Turkey, is shown in Eastern European time (UTC+2). Actually, like the rest of Turkey, it uses UTC+3.
- Nepal’s time zone is UTC+5:45
- Thule Air Base in northwestern Greenland follows UTC-4 rather than UTC-3, and should thus be shown on a tendril to the west, directly above Labrador and the rest of Atlantic Canada; instead, it is shown using UTC-3, like most of the rest of Greenland. This is especially strange considering that Randall has correctly drawn Danmarkshaven as using UTC and Ittoqqortoormiit as using UTC-1.
- Borders and adjacency are not always preserved although often attempted :
- Estonia is shown sharing a border with Finland – in fact, the two countries are separated by the Gulf of Finland. This sea should run to St Petersburg in Russia – instead, the city is shown as landlocked.
- Norway should border Russia. See Norway–Russia border.
- Azerbaijan territory is mistakenly attributed to Georgia – Georgia should not have coast on the Caspian Sea. Armenia should not have coast on the Caspian Sea as well.
- Tajikistan should not border Kazakhstan and follows UTC+5 rather than UTC+6. These would apply to Kyrgyzstan, which is not drawn in the map; Kyrgyzstan, however, does not border Afghanistan.
- Malawi has lost its border with Tanzania.
Omissions
Some countries and territories are missing from the map. Most of these omissions are undoubtedly deliberate, but some are likely mistakes.
- Countries supposedly too small to show on the map’s scale are omitted. These include small European countries: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican City, Djibouti in Africa, Singapore in Asia.
- All the Pacific Ocean isles, including Hawaii.
- All Atlantic and Indian Ocean isles excluding Sri Lanka and Madagascar.
- Most of the small Caribbean countries and territories; however four small dots in the Lesser Antilles are depicted, but are unlabelled and cannot be definitively identified.
- Kyrgyzstan is clearly omitted by mistake.
And finally VonAether created the following map with the Time Zone labels:
4. Bad Map Projection #358: Oops, all South Americas!
Explain XKCD says:
The comic shows a map projection in which every continent and large island has just been replaced with a differently scaled and rotated version of the continent of South America, even though there is only one South America in the real world.
From roughly left to right and top to bottom, the South Americas replace:
- North America
- 3 SAs for the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (possibly Victoria Island, Ellesmere Island, and Baffin Island)
- Greenland
- Iceland
- Ireland (Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, UK)
- Great Britain, UK
- Eurasia
- Newfoundland, Canada
- 2 SAs for Hokkaido and Honshu, Japan
- Africa
- Taiwan
- Cuba
- Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti)
- Puerto Rico, US
- Jamaica
- Sri Lanka
- 5 SAs for Luzon, Bicol Peninsula (southeastern Luzon), one ambiguous landmass (possibly Negros Island), Samar, and Mindanao; Philippines
- Sumatra, Indonesia
- Borneo (Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei)
- Sulawesi, Indonesia
- 2 SAs for New Guinea: one for Bird’s Head Peninsula in the northwest of the island, and one for the rest of the island
- Java, Indonesia
- Madagascar
- Australia
- Tasmania, Australia
- 2 SAs for South Island and North Island, New Zealand
- Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, Argentina and Chile
These are the 26 largest non-Antarctic landmasses, plus 2 peninsulas of those landmasses, and 8 more islands.
5. Bad Map Projection #299: The Greenland Special
The hidden text reads: “The projection for those who think the Mercator projection gives people a distorted idea of how big Greenland is, but a very accurate idea of how big it SHOULD be.”
Explain XKCD states:
Greenland is a large (2.17 million square kilometers of surface area) island in the Arctic ocean and one of the nearest pieces of land to the north pole.
The Mercator projection shows it to be significantly larger than it really is, compared to equator-straddling features such as Africa.
It is therefore one of the most obvious inaccuracies of Mercator’s map, if used (e.g.) in the classroom to teach physical geography (which perhaps would best use a representation that was consistent to area) rather than navigation.
The equal-area projections such as Mollweide or Tobler Hyperelliptical, the latter of which seems to extremely closely match the majority of the features evident upon the hand-drawn map, ensure that shapes contain the same relative proportion of area as they would upon the original spherical (or slightly spheroidal) surface, across all latitudes, but only by bending the directions and rescaling the distances ever more drastically the closer to the map edge (the anti-meridian to that the map is centred upon) you go.
Unlike the Mercator projection, you can show the poles (as the extreme upper and lower limits of the rim) from an equatorially-centred view, and every point of the Earth is given one definite position (or two, where they lie exactly upon the crossing point between the left/right extremes of the map).
This comic’s projection has retained this singular inaccuracy as a deliberate feature, though avoiding all other such inaccuracies of the Mercator projection by using a different projection elsewhere that is designed explicitly to avoid them.
For example, a traditional Mercator map would show other polar areas such as Antarctica, southern South America, or even New Zealand as larger, but this map does not.
6. Bad Map Projection #248: Madagascator
Hidden text reads: “The projection’s north pole is in a small lake on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles, which is off the top of the map and larger than the rest of the Earth’s land area combined.”
Explain XKCD writes:
This time, Randall used the classic Mercator projection but instead of placing the North Pole on top and the South Pole on the bottom it is oriented so that the top is the island of Mahé.
The map projection is technically an Oblique Mercator projection, with an unusual choice of the cylinder’s axis.
Since the Mercator projection tends to visually distort areas near the top and bottom of the resulting map, this gives some areas, notably Madagascar, very unusual shapes, hence the name the Madagascator — a portmanteau of “Madagascar” and “Mercator”!
And
No part of Mahé is visible in the comic, but clicking on the actual comic will open a website that displays Mercator projections with a pole in any chosen location, with the location of the one opened set to Mahé.
The chosen pole is (infinitely far to) the right of the screen, while its antipode is on the left. With this, it is possible to see that the island is indeed larger than the rest of the map’s land area combined.
A single national park within the island rivals Africa in size, and the narrow dirt road closest to the pole appears thicker than Panama.
This also reveals that the location of the map’s north pole (the “small lake” mentioned by Randall) is the lake impounded by the Rochon Dam, a popular tourist location in Mahé.
7. Bad Map Projection #152: ABS(Longitude)
Hidden text: “Positive vibes/longitudes only”
From Explain XKCD:
In this map, Randall has plotted the world map featuring all the landmasses from both western and eastern hemispheres.
But the longitudes west of the prime meridian, normally given negative values from 0° to -180°, have been made positive using the “ABS()” function that gives the absolute value by effectively stripping off the minus sign from any value.
This results in the features on one side of the world being overlaid upon those of the other side, but mirrored.
And
Some features of the real world disappear, such as the English Channel, the North American Great Lakes, and the Strait of Gibraltar.
The Arabian Sea becomes a lake as South America cuts it off from the rest of the Indian Ocean (Indian-Pacific Ocean?).
To further interest the map-connoisseur, various locations are marked and dotted upon their genuine or reflected positions, putting into close proximity various locations that have (mainly) trans-Atlantic separation in reality.
Some of these locations have been renamed in this projection by combining the names of newly overlapping locations.
These are:
- The “Palk-Panama Canal”, combining the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka with the Panama Canal in Central America.
- The “Congo-Amazon Rainforest”, combining the world’s two largest tropical rainforests, the Congo in Africa and the Amazon in South America.
- The “Hudson Plain”, combining Hudson Bay in North America with the West Siberian Plain.
- The “Kara-Baffin Sea”, combining the Kara Sea to the north of Russia with Baffin Bay between Canada and Greenland.
Additionally in northern Siberia is the label “Franklin’s very lost expedition”. Franklin’s lost expedition was an attempt to find a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Arctic passage. Naturally, a sea voyage ending up in the middle of a large landmass would be considered very lost.
8. Bad Map Projection #45: Exterior Kansas
From Explain XKCD:
This comic portrays an unusual projection of a map of the contiguous United States based loosely on an azimuthal projection. Maps of individual countries are common, especially in academic settings.
It is typical for such maps, which only display a limited area of the globe, to use a projection that does not severely distort the shape of the country or its internal borders, but a country that is large enough (as with the United States) will always noticeably suffer from certain distortions of at least one element chosen from distances, areas or angles.
This usually occurs at its extremities (though some projections can be made more faithful to its extremities at the expense of distorting its interior).
Here, however, Randall has opted for a much different projection.
Rather than placing the geographical center of the country in the middle and the borders on the outside, this map has gone the opposite direction, with the border of the US toward the center, and the geographical center of the contiguous US (Kansas) and surrounding states distorted to surround the entire map.
This, understandably, results in the shape of both the national and state borders being largely unrecognizable as it effectively puts every bit of the chosen map features out towards the distorted extremities.
Much of the internal area of Kansas itself (should one wish to display further internal features) may be located far beyond the comic’s edges, perhaps even to infinitely far away on the projected plane.
Which one is your favourite?
More XKCD maps:
- The World According to Americans (Who Really Know Their Geography)
- How To “Improve” The Map of The United States By Cleaning Up Some State Borders
- How To Date An Undated World Map
- What Would Happen If You Pulled A 10m Plug In The Mariana Trench
- All The Land In Our Solar System
- Map Projections & What They Say About You
- Now Time Map
- XKCD Explains The Cause Of Landscape Features Of The United States
You can buy Randall Munroe’s books here:
Jason Allen Jack beeching says
This article was both informative and thought-provoking.