Why does Sweden look so large on a world map?

[The Postman]

Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth

It depends on the map's projection. Some exaggerate the northern latitudes, others minimize them. Sweden looks like a speck on some maps.

Those that 'minimise' them are merely showing them as accurately as possible on flat surface. A globe or google earth is of course most accurate.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by The Postman

Those that 'minimise' them are merely showing them as accurately as possible on flat surface. A globe or google earth is of course most accurate.

Of course. Just illustrating the extremes that can be seen when comparing different projections.

[nei]

Originally Posted by dunno what to put here

Because Google maps are flat and do not take the Earth's spherical shape into account, so it makes places like Sweden and Greenland look huge, ditto for Canada (which is already big, but looks much bigger on Google maps).

If one just projected a globe onto a flat piece of paper you wouldn't get anywhere near as much distortion as the Mercator projection google maps uses. On a map where one degree of latitude = one degree of longnitude everywhere you'd get the same east-west distance become progessively larger on the map going away from the equator: one degree of longitude is proportional to the cosine of the latitude, so a flat map makes the east-west distance appear larger by 1/cos(latitude). As in, the distance from 0 to 10°E appears to be the same distance everywhere on the map, when in reality it isn't: at 60°N going from 0 to 10°E is half the distance of going from 0 to 10°E on the equator. So a map with parellel longitude lines, everything would 2x times longer in the east-west direction at 60° compared to the equator. The mercator project has that effect as well an additional one: to preserve shape and direction, the projection has the north-south distance stretch out by 1/cos(latitude). This makes the distance between latitude line grow increasingly large, the distance on the map between latitude lines on a Mercator projection increases away from the equator: the distance from 60 to 65°N looks much larger than 0 to 5°N when in reality they're the same.

So in summary for a Mercator projection, the same area will be appear larger by a factor of 1/cos^2(latitude) compared to the same area at the equator.