Russia is located in the north of Eurasian continent, with a total area of 17.0982 million square kilometers. It is the largest country in the world and far ahead of Canada, the second largest territory in the world.
The total area of Canada is 9.98 million square kilometers, 7.1182 million square kilometers smaller than Russia, which is almost the same as the area of an Australia. So Russia is indeed very large. In the world map, Russia's territory is larger than any other country, which is also normal. However, in some world maps, Russia's territory seems particularly large and exaggerated.
In this world map, Russia's territory is even larger than the entire Africa, and in fact, Africa's total area is 30.2 million square kilometers, much larger than Russia. In fact, it is not only Russia, Canada, , Greenland , but also the territory of Alaska, the United States is also very exaggerated. Canada and Greenland are almost the same as Africa, and Alaska is even half the size of the United States. So what's going on?
This starts with one person. This person's name is Mercator and is a very famous mapologist. In 1512, Mercator was born in the province of Flanders, the Netherlands at that time, so Mercator was generally considered to be a Dutch Dutch . However, because Mercator is so famous that he is an epoch-making figure in the history of map development, there are still some controversy over Mercator's nationality.
There are three controversial states, the first one is the Netherlands. After all, Mercator was born on the land of the Netherlands at that time. The second one is Belgium . At that time, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg , the three countries belonged to a whole, called Dutch . Mercator is born in the province of Flanders, and is now the second largest city in Belgium, Antwerp .
The third one is Germany. Because Mercator's parents were both Germans, they later moved to the Netherlands to live. Mercator grew up in Flanders and graduated from Luwan University, the best institution in the Netherlands at that time, and laid a good foundation in mathematics, astronomy, geography, .
After graduating from university, Mercator continued to stay in the Netherlands to study geography and geometry, and began to draw maps and make globes, gradually growing into a famous mapologist. But when Mercator was young, he actually did not make much achievements. It was not until 1552 that Mercator, who was 40, emigrated to Germany and invented the map projection method, and became a mapologist who caused a sensation in the world at that time. Therefore, Mercator's main contribution was also completed in Germany. For these reasons, Germany regarded Mercator as a German and chose him as one of the 100 German great men. So how important is Mercator’s map projection method?
The so-called map projection refers to the method of transferring the longitude and latitude lines of the earth's surface to a plane. The earth is a sphere and the map is a plane, so the projection method is very important to draw a map. The era where Mercator was located was in the early days of the Age of Discovery. Mercator and navigators from all over the country maintained close contact, constantly drawing and improving the new world map based on the latest geographical discoveries.
In the process of contacting navigators from all over the country, Mercator found that it was difficult for these navigators to draw the route on the map during their navigation, because the earth is a circular sphere, and the meridian converges at the north and south poles like orange petals. So how can we embody the spherical surface on the plane so that navigators can use straight lines to represent routes?
Finally, Mercator invented the equinescent tangent cylindrical projection method through research, drawing the earth's surface onto a plane. In this way, navigators from all over the world can draw route maps in straight lines on the plane, which greatly facilitated navigation, which caused a sensation in the world at that time, and Mercator also became a milestone figure in the history of map drawing. Later, this projection method was called Mercator projection method , and was widely used in the drawing of charts. However, charts drawn using Mercator projection also have one disadvantage, that is, they are best used in medium and low latitude areas, but not good at high latitude areas.
This is because the specific steps of Mercator projection method are to imagine a cylinder consistent with the direction of the earth axis, cut or cut from the earth, and then project the latitude grid onto the cylindrical surface according to the equiangular conditions, and finally flatten the cylindrical surface to complete the map projection. This will result in a result that the map stretching in high-latitude areas is particularly severe and the deformation is very large. Therefore, in the Mercator projection map, the territory distortion of high-latitude areas such as Russia, Canada, and Greenland is very serious, and Russia's territory is even larger than that of Africa. Since then, with the development of map drawing methods, a variety of projection methods have emerged, but as long as it is the projection method , there will be more or less distortion. To this day, world maps using Mercator projection method are still relatively common.
