Misc
Mapped: Visualizing the True Size of Africa
Mapped: The True Size of Africa
Take a look at any map, and it’s clear that the African continent is a big place.
However, despite the common perception that Africa is a large landmass, it’s still one that is vastly underestimated by most casual map viewers.
The reason for this is that the familiar Mercator map projection tends to distort our geographical view of the world in a crucial way — one that often leads to misconceptions about the relative sizes of both countries and continents.
A Geographical Jigsaw
Today’s infographic comes from Kai Krause and it shows the true size of Africa, as revealed by the borders of the countries that can fit within the continent’s shape.
The African continent has a land area of 30.37 million sq km (11.7 million sq mi) — enough to fit in the U.S., China, India, Japan, Mexico, and many European nations, combined.
Country | Land Area (sq. km) | Land Area (sq. mi) | % of Africa |
---|---|---|---|
🇺🇸 United States | 9.83 million | 3.80 million | 32.4% |
🇨🇳 China | 9.60 million | 3.71 million | 31.6% |
🇮🇳 India | 3.29 million | 1.27 million | 10.8% |
🇲🇽 Mexico | 1.96 million | 0.76 million | 6.5% |
🇵🇪 Peru | 1.29 million | 0.50 million | 4.2% |
🇫🇷 France | 0.64 million | 0.25 million | 2.1% |
🇪🇸 Spain | 0.51 million | 0.20 million | 1.7% |
🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea | 0.46 million | 0.18 million | 1.5% |
🇸🇪 Sweden | 0.45 million | 0.17 million | 1.5% |
🇯🇵 Japan | 0.38 million | 0.15 million | 1.3% |
🇩🇪 Germany | 0.36 million | 0.14 million | 1.2% |
🇳🇴 Norway | 0.32 million | 0.13 million | 1.1% |
🇮🇹 Italy | 0.30 million | 0.12 million | 1.0% |
🇳🇿 New Zealand | 0.27 million | 0.10 million | 0.9% |
🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 0.24 million | 0.09 million | 0.8% |
🇳🇵 Nepal | 0.15 million | 0.06 million | 0.5% |
🇧🇩 Bangladesh | 0.15 million | 0.06 million | 0.5% |
🇬🇷 Greece | 0.13 million | 0.05 million | 0.4% |
Total | 30.33 million sq. km | 11.71 million sq. mi | 99.9% |
You could add together all of the landmasses above and they would not equate to the geographical footprint of Africa, which itself is home to 54 countries and 1.2 billion people.
Editor’s note: The above table is slightly different from the countries shown in the visualization, which focuses more on fitting recognizable country shapes into the geographical shape of Africa.
Why the Misconception?
Interestingly, the problem with maps is not that Africa is sized incorrectly.
Using the animation below, you’ll see that Africa is actually the most accurately sized continent using the common Mercator map projection:
The Mercator projection attempts to place the spherical shape of the world onto a cylinder, causing areas closest to the poles to be “stretched”.
Africa, which straddles the Equator, barely changes in size — meanwhile, the countries furthest from the Equator become inflated from their true sizes on this type of map.
For those of us living in Western countries, this is an interesting dilemma to consider.
This means that the sizes of European and North American countries are distorted, giving us an inaccurate mental “measuring stick” for judging the relative sizes of other countries.
This has implications not only for Africa, but for the whole Southern Hemisphere: South America, India, the Middle East, and even Australia are “bigger” than they may initially appear on a map.
Automotive
How People Get Around in America, Europe, and Asia
Examining how people get around using cars, public transit, and walking or biking, and the regional differences in usage.
How People Get Around in America, Europe, and Asia
This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.
This chart highlights the popularity of different transportation types in the Americas, Europe, and Asia, calculated by modal share.
Data for this article and visualization is sourced from ‘The ABC of Mobility’, a research paper by Rafael Prieto-Curiel (Complexity Science Hub) and Juan P. Ospina (EAFIT University), accessed through ScienceDirect.
The authors gathered their modal share data through travel surveys, which focused on the primary mode of transportation a person employs for each weekday trip. Information from 800 cities across 61 countries was collected for this study.
North American Car Culture Contrasts with the Rest of the World
In the U.S. and Canada, people heavily rely on cars to get around, no matter the size of the city. There are a few exceptions of course, such as New York, Toronto, and smaller college towns across the United States.
Region | 🚗 Cars | 🚌 Public Transport | 🚶 Walking/Biking |
---|---|---|---|
North America* | 92% | 5% | 4% |
Central America | 23% | 42% | 35% |
South America | 29% | 40% | 31% |
Northern Europe | 48% | 29% | 24% |
Western Europe | 43% | 24% | 34% |
Southern Europe | 50% | 24% | 25% |
Eastern Europe | 35% | 40% | 25% |
Southeastern Asia | 44% | 43% | 13% |
Western Asia | 43% | 28% | 29% |
Southern Asia | 22% | 39% | 39% |
Eastern Asia | 19% | 46% | 35% |
World | 51% | 26% | 22% |
Note: *Excluding Mexico. Percentages are rounded.
As a result, North America’s share of public transport and active mobility (walking and biking) is the lowest amongst all surveyed regions by a significant amount.
On the other hand, public transport reigns supreme in South and Central America as well as Southern and Eastern Asia. It ties with cars in Southeastern Asia, and is eclipsed by cars in Western Asia.
As outlined in the paper, Europe sees more city-level differences in transport popularity.
For example, Utrecht, Netherlands prefers walking and biking. People in Paris and London like using their extensive transit systems. And in Manchester and Rome, roughly two out of three journeys are by car.
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