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I feel for the people of Kazakhstan. No matter what citizens say or do, the country will always be known as the backwater that is home to Borat.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s most famous character doesn’t portray the country in the kindest of lights, but in recent years Kazakh Tourism has tried to capitalise on the buzz the films have created and repurposed the phrase “very nice”.
Just don’t go around wearing a Borat ‘mankini’ – that’s a step too far.
One massive misconception about Kazakhstan is that it’s a small country. In fact, the Central Asian country is the ninth-largest in the world.
Via The Telegraph, crossing it on foot would be the same as walking from Dublin to Moscow.
Placed over central and western Europe, you can see the true scale of Kazakhstan:
There’s a reason that there are so many geographical misconceptions of this nature – the Mercator projection, a “cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569”.
More from Science Direct on why this creates issues:
Although the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects, the Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite.
A classic example of the distortion that this projection causes is that it projects Greenland and Antarctica to appear much larger than they actually are relative to land masses nearer the equator, such as Central Africa.
Ah yes, about that.
Here’s a standard world map, with Greenland looking roughly the same size as the whole of Africa:
In reality, Greenland is “just” 2,166 million km², which is less than the Democratic Republic of Congo:
A few more misconceptions cleared up:
If the Democratic Republic of the Congo is bigger than Greenland, what does that say about Africa as a whole? Answer: it’s vast. 30.37 million km² to be precise.
That’s big enough to contain Russia (17.1 million km²) and Canada (9.985 million km²) combined, with room left over for the whole of Scandinavia, Iceland and the UK.
Let’s compare the UK and Ecuador:
The Mercator projection makes Ecuador appear far tinier than it really is.
It’s actually 283,560 km², considerably larger than the United Kingdom (242,495 km²).
Take that, Boris.
That’s enough geography for one day.
You can see more Mercator projection misconceptions unpacked here.
[sources:telegraph&sciencedirect]
