If you cut out Greenland as it is shown on a regular map and superimpose, for example, on Africa, then you will get a whole ice desert in size and even a little more. Is it so ?
We'll find out now …
The problem is that the Earth has a spherical shape, and in order to believably display its objects on a surface, for example, on a computer screen, it, the surface, must also be spherical. There are several ways in which you can project a sphere onto a flat screen, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Google maps are fairly close to the Mercator projection.
Here's a little scientific language:
Cartographic projection is a mathematically defined way of mapping the surface of the Earth (or another celestial body, or in a general sense, any curved surface) onto a plane.
The essence of the projections is related to the fact that the figure of a celestial body (for the Earth - a geoid, for simplicity is usually considered an ellipsoid of rotation), which is not deployed into a plane, is replaced by another figure, which is deployed onto a plane. At the same time, a grid of parallels and meridians is transferred from the ellipsoid to another figure. The appearance of this mesh is different depending on which shape is being replaced by the ellipsoid.
Imagine a cylinder around the Earth that the Earth touches at the equator. At the same time, objects of our planet are drawn on it piece by piece. This projection is close enough to reality. Nevertheless, it implies a distortion in the size of some objects on Earth: the further from the equator we look, the larger everything seems. This is especially true for Greenland due to its farthest location.
Promotional video:
In fact, compared to Africa, Greenland looks like this.
not so impressive, right? Greenland's area is 2,131,000 km², while Africa's is 30,220,000 km². Something similar happened with Russia, which at first glance is simply huge.
In fact, Africa is almost twice as large as Russia in area: 30,220,000 km² versus 17,100,000 km². And everything really looks like this.
Here is a map that reflects the real scale of objects on Earth.
Do you know why a straight line is farther than an arc?
Here's another seemingly strange example:
The path along the dotted line in the picture is shorter than the path along the solid line. And now in a little more detail on the example of sea routes:
More examples …
The USA, placed on a par with Australia, seems incredibly small:
If Romania were an island in the Arctic Ocean:
Australia is bigger than it seems - it can cover all of Europe:
If Brazil is moved to Asia:
Indonesia stretches out almost the entire width of Russia:
Greenland is not that big compared to the US or Brazil:
China moved to Russian territory:
Canada in South America:
California is almost the size of the UK:
Australia, placed in North America, seems really huge:
Antarctica is not much larger than Brazil:
Japan:
India:
Canada: