When you imagine a map of the world what do you see?

Most of us are familiar with one very common design created over 500 years ago and is the work of Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century Flemish cartographer (mapmaker). His most famous work, the Mercator projection, is a geographical chart where the spherical globe is flattened into a two-dimensional map, with latitude and longitude lines drawn in a straight grid. This is why Antarctica appears so wide across the bottom!

But did you know that a lot of countries are not as big or small as they look on a typical world map? Don’t believe me? Check out some great examples from Geospatial World here.