I mean it's greatly exaggerated on Mercator but it's definitely not tiny.
It's bigger than Australia
That outline is like the entire continental shelf, or all the area where the glaciers are directly over rock (as opposed to having ocean in between), or something like that.
But if the ice weren't there, not all of it would actually be above sea level:
Might actually be smaller than Australia if the ice were gone, give or take things like sea level rise and isostatic rebound.
TIL that Antarctica is an archipelago.
You’re an archipelago
If the ice weren't there a lot of the other continents would also be below sea level
Hence "most other continents"
Yeah it's smaller but not tiny
Nice. What did you use for that one?
https://niy.ai/worldmap lets you reproject Mercator to put any landmass you want in the middle by clicking on it, but it doesn't have that overlay thing.
Also bigger than Texas
It's just like they say: "everything's bigger than Texas!"
Friendly reminder that Europe is not a continent.
If Europe isn't a continent then neither is India!
It gets called The Indian subcontinent for ~~exactly that reason~~ but not Europe because of colonialism.
How dare you! Oh, wait, I agree!
If India is a continent then so is Somalia! And Arabia, but for some reason Arabia being it's own continent feels kinda right considering it really feels like neither Eurasia nor Africa, just a large mass between them
Are we going with Eurasia or an Afro-Eurasia distinction? I feel like if someone were to insist on Afro-Eurasia then they also have to accept The Americas, or I guess it would just be a simple "America" which would get confusing since that's a pretty common verbal shorthand for USA. Under that sort of definition I think if you still insist on North and South America as regions then you'd have to also accept North and South Afro-Eurasia.
It'd also be pretty funny to try to argue that since North America was connected to Asia within the human timeline it should also be added. Imagine trying to refer to the continents: AfroAmeriEurasia, Australia, and Antarctic, with an optional Oceania thrown in the mix.
For clarity, I usually just go with North/South America, Australia, Antarctica, Africa, and Eurasia as the continental landmasses
So long as we include Hokkaido in North America that's good by me
Fun fact, Mercator would in principle be even more distorted than it is, but almost every map that uses it crops at least the top and bottom 5 degrees to hide it. Mercator's original cropped to 66°S - 80°N, which shifts Europe towards the middle.
Another fun-fact: The Mercator projection was, at its inception, the first map that could be used for long-distance sea navigation over the mediterranean and Atlantic in the sense that axes are scaled such that courses plotted on the map actually match the compass course you need to follow to get somewhere. This also happens to be the reason it became popular, and the reason it was made, rather than the commonly quoted reason of "making Europe big at the expense of things closer to the equator".
And Mercator means merchant in Latin. I thought that was because of the projection's purpose, but turns out that the inventer's name was actually Mercator, which was a latinisation of his Flemish birthname Kremer (meaning grocer or merchant).
Now that is a fun-fact! I knew the guy was called Mercator, but didn't know about the Latin origin, and can definitely see the origin of the name spreading as a misconception.
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
