The True Size of Africa

An image from Kai Krause, here corrected at Information is Beautiful for map projection errors by Manuela Schmidt (which is the image I have at the right). Krause's original image included a short blurb on his image, including a table showing the the land mass of the countries he included closely matches Africa (they total about 100,000 square kilometers less). Others, like The Economist, have reworked the map overlays to suit their druthers and address projection distortions (see image, below).

Information is Beautiful, which is a great web site in general, by the way, worked up (or found) some related geographic overlays of its own:

This is all very cool, and gives one a good sense of the relative sizes of some places on Earth -- and in particular how huge and often overlooked the area of Africa is.

All of the images above come from the websites I refer to in the text; other copyrights, as they exist, are noted there. I note, also, that I saw this image (one that had been floating around in 2010, and I'd seen then), through a recent post on This is Interesting, which uses the original Kai Krause image verbatim (and without link). Anyway ...