Shocking proportions: how Russia should look like on world maps in reality

Leonid Zlotov

In the last year, social networks have not gone out of fashion to “debunk” the myth of the colossal size of Russia, visibly represented on world maps. So Novye Izvestia made its contribution in December last year, showing that in fact our country is larger than Canada or China, but not as much as it might seem.

Then we reminded readers that the maps created by the German scientist Gerard Mercator back in the 15th century were to blame for this misconception. The fact is that it is impossible to arrange the continents on a plane adequately to how they are located on the globe in reality, and therefore, with such attempts, distortions inevitably arise, and the closer to the poles of the Earth, the more extensive the geographical object looks on a flat map. For example, any island placed at the pole will be five times larger than if it were located at the equator.

And now a very clear picture of how different countries actually look in comparison with each other has appeared on the Web. That is, in reality, the area of Russia, for example, is less than twice the area of \u200b\u200bthe United States, while on the map it looks much larger. It would be good to show this map to Russian schoolchildren so that they do not have a false sense of the greatness of their homeland.

So, the top ten countries in terms of size looks like this:

Russia: 17,098,242 km²

Canada: 9,984,670 km²

China: 9,706,961 km²

USA: 9,372,610 km²

Brazil: 8,515,767 km²

Australia: 7,692,024 km²

India: 3,287,590 km²

Argentina: 2,780,400 km²

Kazakhstan: 2,724,900 km²