This video shows you the true size of countries compared to how they look on maps

The Mercator projection is the most popular map projection in the world.

And, apparently, it’s also wrong.

Gerardus Mercator created the projection around 1569, with lines of longitude and latitude, but critics have long since found that the map also made certain areas – namely Europe, Russia and the US - much bigger than they actually are.

What many people don't know is that it's also inaccurate because the Earth is a 3D globe: attempting to translate that to 2D inevitably causes distortions.

The people over at RealLifeLore used data from The True Size, created by James Talmafe and Damon Maneice to show the real size of countries, and made a video.

The UK is rather a lot smaller than you might think: places like Japan, The Phillipines, Sumatra, Madagascar, and New Zealand are much larger than our little island.

Canada is roughly the same size as China.

Australia appears to be a behemoth - but an accurate reading of the world map shows Brazil to be larger, making it bigger than one of the world's seven contents. Brazil also spans across almost all of Europe.

Africa is a colossal continent. It can almost fit the entire contiguous US...in just the Sahara desert.

The continent can also fit in China, Eastern Europe, India, Argentina, Scandinavia and the UK with room to spare.

Although Greenland appears to be bigger than Australia, in reality, it’s tiny.

You can watch the entire video, below:

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