s. Area and Distance. You know a Mercator map is useful as a navigational aid, b
ID: 2269322 • Letter: S
Question
s. Area and Distance. You know a Mercator map is useful as a navigational aid, but can you use a Mercator map to compare the areas of two regions? Use the Mercator map and the table of areas to answer the question. What happens to the area of a region as you move farther from the equator? Do you think it would be easy to determine distance between two cities on a Mercator map? Explain your reasoning. (Source: The Universal Almanac) Region Africa Antarctica Asia Australia Europe North America South America Area (in square miles) 11,687,188 5,100,023 17,176,102 3,035,651 4,065,945 9,357,294 6,880,638Explanation / Answer
No. In a mercator projection the latitude circles are flat lines and all latitude lines have equal length. In real world as we go towards pole these circles reduce in size, but in the projection it stays same. So as we go from equator to pole the distortion becomes absurdly large where the two poles points are two lines having length of the Earth's equatorial line, which is absurdly stretched. We see Antarctica as this big landmass on any mercator projected map, it looks bigger than Asia but in real world we can see from the chart that antarctica is less than half of Asia's size.
As we move further from the equator the apparant area increases. Near poles this increment is absurdly high.
Near the equator the mercator projection is good for finding the distance between two points, but the distance between a point near equator to a point near the polar region on this projection doesn't have the true value, because the shortest line joining them curve towards the poles in a great amount. So mercator projection is not suitable to find large, cross polar distances.
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