SEE The True Size Of Africa

Designer Kai Krause created the first true representation of the African continent, showing how huge Africa really is. It turns out that Africa is bigger than the USA, China, India, Japan and all of Europe combined.

Designer Kai Krause created the visual representation of Africa dispelling misconception about true size of African continent. “Africa is just simply huge – much, much bigger than we all thought,” says Krause. “You just look at it, understand and smile, because you can never forget it.” It turns out that Africa is bigger than the USA, China, India, Japan and all of Europe combined.

The reason behind the underestimation of the real size of African continent is so called Mercator projection – the standard of portraying Earth on geographical maps all over the world, first presented in 1569, and now internationally adapted.

This standard tends to portray size of landmasses near the poles much larger than in reality. On the contrary, sizes of landmasses near equator look much smaller than they really are.

Though Mercator projection was a great advantage for Europeans of the Renaissance because it let them to draw the lines of constant course, it created a great misconception about the real size of Africa. Nevertheless, it also gave Europeans a larger-looking size of their lands and the central position in the globe.