THE AFRICA

The True Size of Africa Africa is much bigger than what it looks like on most maps of the world. How much bigger? Well, you could fit all of the following 18 countries into Africa, and still have room leftover : USA*, China, India, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Norway, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Nepal, Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea. Total area of all the countries above = 30.102 million sq. km. Africa's total area = 30.221 million sq. km. (or about 119,000 sq. km. larger) The map below was created by computer graphics artist, Kai Krause, and shows this in a graphically striking way: by fitting a map of each of the countries into a map of Africa much like a huge jigsaw puzzle. This is pretty mind blowing - as Africa does not look much bigger than China or USA on most maps. Of course, we know the reason for this is because of the distortions introduced by the widely used Mercator projection and the problem of trying to represent a sphere on a flat map, as explained in this article on Map projection in Wikipedia. What is surprising though is the extent of the disparity between the apparent and actual sizes of regions on a map. In fact. as Krause explains - he created the map to highlight precisely this popular misconception about the massive scale and size of Africa. He says that similar to illiteracyand innumeracy there should also be a concept called "immappancy" meaninginsufficient geographical knowledge.