Posts Tagged ‘cartography’

The real size of Africa – putting the maps right

September 4th, 2008 by christo

Due to the Euro-centric tendencies of most map projections we tend to have the wrong idea of the African continent’s size relative to other land masses.  At 30,301,1596 square kilometers, African is a vast continent.  As demonstrated on this map from The Times atlas,  it is considerably larger than China, the USA, Western Europe, India, Argentina and the British Isles combined!  (Hat-tip to Normblog for the link.)

Africa in perspective