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Why does nobody talk about how Alaska gets stretched on every map
I was looking at a road trip map for a buddy moving to Anchorage and noticed the state looks twice as wide as it should. Then I checked three different online maps and every single one had Alaska stretched out like a rubber band. The Mercator projection pushes it out to about 594,000 square miles when it's really around 665,000, so the shape gets all warped near the top. You see the same thing with Greenland looking bigger than Africa, but Alaska gets ignored because it's part of the US. Compared to a globe view, it's a totally different landmass and it throws off any distance planning. Has anyone else caught this on a specific map or app they use for travel?
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the_robin9d ago
Check the scale bar next time you're zoomed out on Google Maps. Alaska will show a scale that's flat out wrong for the state because the bar is set at the equator, so measuring anything up north gives you bad numbers. Same deal on weather apps, the radar loop over Anchorage looks squished while the lower 48 looks normal. Map makers just accept it because fixing it means a curved view and nobody wants to rotate a globe on their phone. The stretch is baked into the math, not a mistake anyone forgot to correct.
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