Interesting. Didn’t realise so few countries gained land. Guess the well known Northern bias is mostly a case of to what degree the remaining countries lose land.
Wonder which country is the closest to breaking even. And how the list works out ordered by percentage.
Surely it's all relative - so you could calculate it only in terms of countries gaining land if you wanted to, or only in terms of countries losing land, or anywhere on the scale in between
I guess the natural way to calculate it is to scale so that the total area of the projection matches the total area of the globe that it covers. (That's why you need a cutoff, so that the former is finite.)
The whole northern bias argument is essentially baseless drivel by people who don't understand maps, and who as a result propose terrible alternatives, while there are very nice non-rectangular accurate projections. Mercator is great for navigation, hence why versions of it are still used today. Simple as that. Sorry, personal pet peeve.
The book 'Longitude' is an excellent read on sea-going navigation and mapping. As a boater in the San Juan Islands, Sea of Cortez and the Inside Passage charts are essential despite the distortion of land mass. Here is an interesting visual of the mercator scale of distortion.
The quiz felt a little backward to me. Mercator maps try to normalize the land masses to determine east/west distance from Greenwich. Meaning the northern/southern land masses get stretched, map-wise out to maintain longitude perspective with the equator. Those that lose mass are nearer the equator. It's all kind of weird, but somewhat essential to know for seagoing navigation when GPS fails and all you have are paper charts and a pencil. :=)
The Mercator projection is a Greelandian conspiracy!
Wonder which country is the closest to breaking even. And how the list works out ordered by percentage.
Also the thumbnail pic for the quiz? I don't get it.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mercator-map-true-size-of-countries/