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Why is the difference only extremely pronounced in the northern hemisphere? If I understand the math behind the projection correctly, the equator should be true scale, and things should vary more the further north AND south you go.
This image shows the extreme southern latitudes to be almost equal to their true area. Is the image wrong, or am I misunderstanding something about the projection?
Did it cut out the European portion of Russia?
TL;DR Somebody made an awful mistake rendering this map, it's way too low-poly.
It't not exactly the European portion but most of its recognizable parts (Kola peninsula, Caucascus...) are missing because of the horrible SVG compression that deleted vertices presumably by count rather than keeping the most significant* ones. Just look how the Mercator/shrunk versions differ from each other and from an actually good map! Not even they will show every fjord of Iceland but at least they won't reduce it to a triangle!
* A simple illustration would be Colorado, originally defined as a (Mercator) rectangle (between meridians and parallels) but ending up a 697-sided polygon (still way fewer than most surveyed administrative areas that size) largely because of surveying errors. However, if you pick the 1ˢᵗ, 175ᵗʰ, 349ᵗʰ and 523ʳᵈ vertex (or points every 362 mi/582 km along the border), you don't approximate the shape nearly as well as by picking the 4 corners of the defining rectangle.
And because corners are always mostly convex (they have to be because turns add up to 360° for closed areas), this compression will remove area more frequently than add it. This makes the map quite disingenuous (maybe not intentionally), as it amplifies the effect OOP was trying to show.
If I were a full-time Lemmy commenter, I'd download the Colorado polygon from OSM, import sone geo-libraries into Python and do all 174** combinations of picking the 1ˢᵗ, 175ᵗʰ, 349ᵗʰ and 523ʳᵈ vertex, visualize each quadrilateral (with great-circe edges) as a video frame with its area printed in the center.
What Colorado might look like using an algorithm similar to OOP's:
(Manually created single frame but accurate to the number of digits shown. Also, I actually used every 228ᵗʰ of the 912 OSM waypoints, which are sometimes redundant (colinear), which I didn't bother to check.)
(Edit: maybe official government geoJSON would help? The best files are "500k" or "1:500,000 resolution", and even they reduce Colorado to 357 vertices. The complete dataset is probably https://www2.census.gov/geo/docs/maps-data/data/grfc/public_grfc_cur25_08.txt (50 MB text file!); see also legend and FIPS but that is for all Colorado's counties, I'd have to merge the polygons and maybe also remove any non-polygon data if there's any.) ArcGIS says they processed the data but they probably left lots of redundant colinear points in, since there's 1565 vertices in their dataset.
** Technically 697 options because 697 is not divisible by 4. But only ¼ of them are fully distinct, as every consecutive 4 maps have an identical starting vertex and just differ in which pair of vertices is 175 apart as opposed to the normal 174.
How can it be the true size if it’s still a projection on a 2d surface? I thought could only see the true size on a 3d globe.
It's a curved 2d surface
Whatever happened to that wavy "W/M" looking one I remember seeing on some news stations when I was younger?
The Goode Homolosine projection. You lose accurate direction, shape, AND size to a degree, but less size issues than some projections. It's a good way to remind kids that the world is round, but once you try to use it for anything like showing a route or visualizing relative distances, the limitations become significant.
Interesting how much closer kazakhstan (and by extension, china) is to europe when you see it like this. Like if the red outlines were all smooshed back closely together.
Crossing the globe north to south is the same distance as east to west, but since it is folded open on 2d maps it looks as if the earth is wider then it is higher. In this projection that means the map is stretched more horizontally than vertically, if i understand correctly.
In this projection that means the map is stretched more horizontally than vertically, if i understand correctly
You're right! And yes, north to south is roughly the same distance as east to west. Subconsciously I've always felt like north to south is a quicker journey, but that was just Mercator playing a trick upon me
but that was just Mercator playing a trick upon me
Nearly every projection that show the entire globe on a 2d canvas will show you a map where the horizontal distance is almost double the vertical distance, so it is very correct that a journey from the top to the bottom is much shorter than from the most left to the most right.
Now guess where China builds railroads for exports to Europe.
Is Africa the only one here not stuffing socks down their trousers?
Russia 😂
It's still pretty big.
