Seeing isn’t always believing!!! Traditional World maps would have you believe that Europe and America are huge, and Africa is small however, Russia 17.1 million km² is almost 2 times smaller than Africa 30.221 million km² and North America (USA, Canada, Alaska and Mexico) is only 23.51 million km² making it considerably smaller than Africa.
In 1569, Gerardus Mercator, introduced a map system wherein all the lines of longitude were parallel to all the lines of latitude effectively creating a grid, called the Mercator Projection. This was beneficial to all the navigators at the time as they could set their compass with an angle and reach their destination with an almost 100% accuracy rate however, as result of the cylindrical map all land masses near the equator appear smaller whilst all further from the equator appear to be much larger than they are, that’s what you get when you try and represent a sphere in a flat 2d format.
