00:00The map of the world is a lot stranger than you think it is, especially this map.
00:04You've probably seen it a lot in classrooms or office buildings, but this map is extremely, very badly wrong.
00:09As we can all hopefully agree upon, the Earth is a sphere,
00:12and that means that it is impossible to accurately depict her surface on a two-dimensional map.
00:17This particular common map is called the Mercator Projection,
00:20and if you'd like to experiment with countries for yourself,
00:22please go to this website called thetruesize.com after this video to see what I'm talking about.
00:27Let's take the U.S. state of Wyoming as an example.
00:30Under the assumption that Wyoming is actually a real place and not a land full of tumbleweeds
00:34with a population less than downtown Baltimore,
00:36this example will work perfectly because of the state's square shape.
00:41As we stack one unit of Wyoming on top of each other,
00:43we get more and more distorted as we approach the North Pole
00:46to the point where we don't even really recognize its familiar, boring shape anymore.
00:50When we move our Wyoming stacks south, they get more squished together as we approach the equator.
00:55This will happen with every other landmass in the world, but first, let's take a look at some other U.S. states.
01:00They say that everything is bigger in Texas, but what is Texas itself bigger than?
01:04Moving the borders over to Europe, the answer may surprise you.
01:06Texas is much bigger than Spain and Portugal put together, and is also even bigger than France.
01:12But Texas is only the second biggest U.S. state behind Alaska,
01:16which seems absolutely gargantuan at the top of our map.
01:19But while Alaska is large, it isn't that large.
01:22Taken down to the U.S. mainland, it compares like this, and taken to Europe, it looks like this.
01:27And while we're here in Europe, let's take the time to understand how much bigger Europe seems than what it actually should be.
01:33Let's start by taking France and moving it down to Africa to get our first glimpse at this.
01:37The United Kingdom seems pretty large as well, but let's take India and move it over to see just how small it really is.
01:43The United Kingdom is actually smaller than quite a lot of places in the world that you might not expect.
01:48Places like Japan, the Philippines, Sumatra, Madagascar, and New Zealand.
01:56Next door to New Zealand is Australia, and the U.K. looks so small just off the East Coast in comparison.
02:02And Australia, in fact, is much bigger than most people believe it to be.
02:06It can be placed to cover almost the entire continental U.S.
02:09Interestingly, the combination of the following countries will not cover that same area.
02:14Portugal, the Netherlands, Estonia, Albania, Hungary, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, Croatia, Latvia,
02:20the Czech Republic, Serbia, Switzerland, Slovakia, Lithuania, Denmark, Ireland, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania,
02:26the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, and Norway.
02:29And that's not even factoring in big, but not too big, Alaska to the north.
02:33Between Alaska and the United States is Canada, which also seems huge up here.
02:37And while Canada is a very large country, it's actually roughly the same size as China,
02:41but still looks like a colossus when placed in Europe,
02:44where it stretches from east to west to Portugal to Iran and up north into the Barents Sea just above of Russia.
02:50Slightly off topic, Japan is another bigger place than most people believe it to be.
02:54If Japan were placed off the U.S. East Coast, it would look like this in comparison.
02:58But much, much bigger than Japan and also not often thought about is Brazil, which is an absolutely massive country.
03:05It doesn't really look like it on our map, but when we move it to Australia, we can actually discover that Brazil is much bigger,
03:11which makes Brazil larger than one of the world's seven continents.
03:15Brazil is also almost larger than the United States, spans almost all of Europe, but fits rather snugly into Africa.
03:24We are about to discover that Africa is a colossal continent that we don't often realize.
03:29It can almost fit the entire contiguous United States into just the Sahara Desert,
03:34and the continent can also squeeze in China, Western Europe, India, Argentina, Scandinavia, and the UK, and still have some room left over.
03:42Russia is another place that looks pretty big at the top of the map, but dropped down next to Africa,
03:47she also seems much smaller than what our map was telling us beforehand.
03:51While we're still here in Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo used to be a colony of Belgium,
03:56but Belgium in comparison looks like this.
03:59Finally, we need to look at a few other places on the map to the north and the south.
04:03Let's start with Sweden, which looks big, but comparing it to Madagascar again, we see that it actually isn't.
04:08Iceland also seems like a large island, but it's actually roughly the same size as Tasmania, just south of Australia.
04:15And finally, we have the white elephant in the room of Greenland, which towers like a behemoth at the top of the map.
04:21Greenland masquerades as being a continent in her own right, looking bigger than Australia, South America, and being comparable to North America.
04:29But in reality, Greenland is much, much smaller.
04:32The globe reveals Greenland to be the island that she pretends that she isn't, and we get a much more accurate depiction this time
04:38when we compare her to Australia, South America, and North America.
04:42And of course, we can't forget about the most shy continent in the world that everybody always forgets about, Antarctica,
04:48who spends her time hiding away at the bottom of the map.
04:51Most people don't truly have a good understanding of the size of Antarctica,
04:55which could probably go either way between being larger or smaller than you think.
04:59But the truth is, Antarctica is a huge continent.
05:02It is much bigger than Australia.
05:04It can stretch all the way from Kiev to Uganda,
05:07and incredibly, can be placed between the southernmost tip of Texas in the United States,
05:11and stretch all the way into the northernmost islands of Canada.
05:15There are many more examples like this, but you have probably understood the point by now.
05:19The world is both a bigger place and a smaller place than you previously thought it to be.
05:24Leave your comments below saying what you found to be the most interesting,
05:28or another crazy fact you may have discovered or already knew on your own.
05:32You can check out this brilliant website that I used as a resource for making this video over here at thetruesize.com,
05:37and I hope that you'll subscribe to my channel by clicking here if you're interested in watching more content like this in the future.
05:43As always, this was Real Life Lore.
05:49the future flower, as always, is going to be there for some opportunities to have built at thetruesize.
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06:08Come maybe, in the future?
06:11Okay.
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