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Which is larger? Yours, or mine? Australia or the United States of America, that is. With the bushfires in Australia out of control incinerating large swathes of the country a map was produced to visually depict how widespread the fires are. For emphasis the map was overlaid on top of America to give people an idea of the scope of the problem Australia is dealing with. Americans responded with disbelief that Australia was just as large as the USA. People were also in shock over how large an area, measured by size of US states, are currently burning. Responses on social media show how shocked and dumbfounded people were learning this.
- Area of Australia = 7.692 million km2
- Area of USA, excluding Alaska = 7.653 million km2
Here is the image under discussion.
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Australian Bushfire Map Superimosed Over America Sows Disbelief
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Grelb's Reminder:
Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above
average drivers.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:37AM (5 children)
Even the people I know who took geography or relatively well-informed were taken aback by it. I think it is because of two reasons. The first is that the standard projection used on maps is the Mercator projection. That has the well-known effect of making landmasses closer to the poles appear larger. Since Australia is closer to the equator and the Continental U.S. is closer to the poles, the latter will appear larger on the map. The second cause I think is at play here is most people don't hear about Australia very much, so whatever picture they have of it is bound to physically shrink because if it were large and important, we'd hear about it more.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kazzie on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:07AM
I'd add to this the fact that the US is adjacent to Canada, which is further north, and looks even bigger in a Mercator projection: the continent of North America looks huge compared to Australia, and half of a huge thing is still going to be pretty enormous. Australia on the other hand, is surrounded by ocean, so looks like an "island". And those are always small, right?
My unconcious estimate was that Australia would be somewhere around three quarters the size of the US (simple east-west length, not area). So it's still a little surprising to me that they're so similar, but perhaps my assumption wasn't scandalously bad.
Mind you, I live in a European country that's only ~20,000km2, so they're both blooming huge to me!
(Score: 5, Funny) by Nuke on Wednesday January 08 2020, @10:28AM (2 children)
I am reminded of Ronald Reagan's world map. California alone is about twenty times the size of Australia :-
https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~292186~90064336:The-world-according-to-Ronald-Reaga [davidrumsey.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 08 2020, @04:21PM (1 child)
Decades ago when I saw a version of Ronald Regan's world map, it had a spot in the icy north labeled "Palestinian Homeland (proposed)".
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday January 08 2020, @07:23PM
The version I linked to does show that - on Svalbard by the look of it, or maybe simply on the icecap.
(Score: 4, Funny) by VLM on Wednesday January 08 2020, @01:02PM
Gen-Xers and boomers have "Crocodile Dundee" movies to remind them of Australia.
Younger folks only have Steve Irwin and depressingly he died like 15 years ago.
The best Australia has today is David Jones the EE blogger. EE stuff typically causes instant vaginal dryness among roughly 50% of the population, unlike crocodile dundee in the 80s, so naturally this is going to impact survey results when only people who know how to properly set base bias current in each transistor of a class B bipolar transistor amplifier have even heard of Australia in the last decade or so.