Thinking of the many countries involved in the Euros and Copa America reminded me of a great website I came across a while back - it's a real eye-opener.
https://thetruesize.com allows you to drag any country to a different part of the globe, as represented by the two-dimensional Mercator Projection world map we're all so familiar with. This projection notoriously produces huge distortions in the latitudes as they approach the poles, most obviously in the northern hemisphere as that's where most of the land is.
For instance, Greenland, being close the the North Pole, always looks enormous but in reality it's only about 30% the size of Australia - and is actually smaller than Algeria, which is much nearer the Equator where the distortion is far less pronounced. And try dragging the UK to the Equator to see how tiny it really is! (Same size as Uganda.)
Hours of educational fun for all the family, ages 5 to 105.
https://thetruesize.com allows you to drag any country to a different part of the globe, as represented by the two-dimensional Mercator Projection world map we're all so familiar with. This projection notoriously produces huge distortions in the latitudes as they approach the poles, most obviously in the northern hemisphere as that's where most of the land is.
For instance, Greenland, being close the the North Pole, always looks enormous but in reality it's only about 30% the size of Australia - and is actually smaller than Algeria, which is much nearer the Equator where the distortion is far less pronounced. And try dragging the UK to the Equator to see how tiny it really is! (Same size as Uganda.)
Hours of educational fun for all the family, ages 5 to 105.
