Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
Canada’s territory of Nunavut is both Canada’s largest and least populated province or territory.
It covers and area of 1,877,778 km2 or nearly 8x the size of the UK or 2.5x the size of Texas.
It’s so big that makes up about one-fifth of Canada’s total land area.
But it has a population of just 36,858 people.
This is so few people that only 5 countries in the world have fewer people:
Anyone with a passing interest in geography is probably aware that the Mercator Map projection grossly distorts the size of some countries.
You can see by just how much on the following article: Map Projections: Mercator Vs The True Size of Each Country.
Alternatives do exist, which you can learn more about here: Map Projections & What They Say About You.
However, even I didn’t fully realise how distorted my view of the world was until I started playing around with Free Map Tools’ Measure a Distance tool.
Below are 7 maps showing just how much bigger and smaller some parts of the world are compared to what you probably think they are.
The 5 maps below are all examples of one country being separated from another by only 1 land border.
The map above shows the Indonesian island of Java, which is by far the world’s most populous island. But why do so many people live there?
From the map’s author:
The short video above shows the full effect of XKCD 1335 Now, which constantly updates to show you what time it is in the world where you are.
It has obviously been accelerated to show a full day’s spin in a few seconds. The actual comic completes one revolution per day.
Hidden text: This image stays roughly in sync with the day (assuming the Earth continues spinning). Shortcut: xkcd.com/now
More about it below with the help of Explain XKCD:
The author also states that:
The map above is designed as a fun thought experiment: “If you were to randomly be born again, into one of these colored regions, which one would you choose?”
You can interpret exactly what that means yourself, but the way I think about it is that you have an equal chance of being born into each country of a given color.
For example if you picked Yellow, you might be randomly reborn in the United States or China or equally Afghanistan or Iraq.
Of course you could also look at it based on population or area.
Here’s a list of countries for each color:
The map above shows how four of the world’s most important domesticated cereals spread across Europe, Asia and Africa between 7,000 and 3,500 years ago.