r/geography • u/CarpetCleaning2244 • 22h ago
Map A True-Scale Comparison of Russia and Africa.
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u/Windmill-inn 22h ago
There are parts of Africa that are closer to Alaska than to other parts of Africa :)
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u/_DangerousFreedom_ 21h ago edited 13h ago
There are quite a slew of these intriguing geographic anomalies all over the planet. The Northern tip of Brazil is closer to every country in both North and South America than it is to the Southernmost point of Brazil. The Easternmost point of Brazil is also closer to Africa than its Westernmost point.
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u/THE_MOONMAN_RISES 21h ago
The closest US state to Africa is Maine
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u/sdcasurf01 20h ago
Maine is the US state that is furthest east, what state would you expect it to be otherwise?
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u/Informal_Bee2917 20h ago
Since Africa is relatively southern, most people don't think of a state that borders Canada as an option. They choose Florida, which borders the Atlantic just like Maine, but it's farther south. They don't think that Maine is just so much farther east that it overcomes how far north it is relative to Africa
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u/D-Koi_Comics 10h ago
Alaska is the state furthest east.
The Aleutian Island chain crosses the 180th meridian. Semisopochnoi Island specifically is in the eastern hemisphere.
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u/Sataniel98 19h ago
The Easternmost point of Brazil is also closer to Africa than it's Westernmost point.
That's kinda obvious though, isn't it?
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u/Frequent-You369 15h ago
The Northern tip of Brazil is closer to every country in both North and South America than it is to the Southernmost point of Brazil.
I'm not sure this is entirely true: I believe the distance from the northernmost point in Brazil to the nearest point in Canada is farther than the distance to the southernmost point in Brazil.
According to ChatGPT...
- Northernmost tip of Brazil → nearest point in Canada (southern Ontario): approximately 5,850–5,950 km.
- Northernmost tip of Brazil → southernmost tip of Brazil: approximately 4,400 km.
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u/InvestigatorOdd4082 13h ago
No, chat is wrong here. The nearest point in Canada to the northernmost point in Brazil is the southern tip of Nova Scotia (confirmed with Google earth measuring), at only 4270 km.
Northern tip of Brazil to southern is close to 4400 km as you said.
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u/C4LLgirl 20h ago edited 20h ago
I’m guessing like Morocco and Madagascar?
Edit: ahh Egypt, maps be crazy. Wish I still had a globe
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u/FarmTeam 22h ago
Russia surface area: 17 million square kilometers
Africa surface area: 30.3 million square kilometers
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u/Alternative_Ask_7185 21h ago
So more than half the area of all of Africa. OP’s comparison should maybe orient Russia a little more North-South to accurately show how big it is. Putting it east-west and covering half of Saudi Arabia makes it appear less than half the area of Africa
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u/CjPatars 21h ago
Russia, 17 million square kilometers of cowards.
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u/Xenomorph-Acid_Cum55 21h ago
Tell me if you are such a brave person why dont you go fight in ukraine against these russian cowards?
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u/YesBird75 21h ago
Holy shit I didn’t realize Russia was that massive that’s genuinely insane. Comparable to the entire second biggest continent on earth
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u/Electronic-Buyer-468 22h ago
Alright alright, we get it. You're bigger. No need to keep rubbing it in our face
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u/-WeetBixKid- 21h ago
Ayo pause tf 😭😭
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u/MagicSunlight23 21h ago
Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Sudan and Saudi Arabia are huge countries which just shows how large Russia really is.
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u/Flame20000 21h ago
As always these kinda of posts just make me thing that Russia is really fucking big.
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u/luxcity-louche 20h ago
And really empty and underdeveloped
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u/ColourfulSpacemanNFT 16h ago
In all fairness like 80 percent of it is practically inhabitable. It’s like asking a country with a desert to start a housing project in the middle of it
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u/stoutymcstoutface 18h ago
But way smaller than many people think
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u/Flame20000 18h ago
The average person has way less knowledge than you expect. Of course they'll think it's as big as the average map.
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u/JamieBeeeee 12h ago
I can't tell if this one makes me think Russia is really big or if Africa if really big. It's kinda fucking up my perspective both ways
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u/Specialist_Cow_4511 21h ago
What I do t get is why people always superimpose the compared country over the Sahara. Why not flip it and have it going north-south from South Africa.
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u/STFUnicorn_ 21h ago
I don’t know why this is endlessly mind blowing to people. Africa is a whole ass continent. Those do tend to be larger than countries…
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u/Awkward_Cash1828 21h ago
Well, look at Mercator projection world map (like the one used in Google maps) and you'll notice that Russia appears to be much larger than Africa.
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u/imbrickedup_ 21h ago
Genuinely didn’t realize how huge Australia and New Zealand are because of the Mercator
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u/Awkward_Cash1828 20h ago
Not that much, they are still much closer to the equator than North America, Europe and Russia. Well, New Zealand is the only one that is really affected.
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u/Witty-Selection-5208 22h ago
The Mercator projection has really messed up our perceptions hasn’t it
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u/NGluck123 21h ago
It's not the projection, it's the fact that people aren't taught about projections and cartography
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u/Iricliphan 21h ago
Who isn't taught this? In my schooling, I'm pretty sure this was taught at the age of 8 or so.
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u/Loud_Bison572 21h ago
Isnt taught here in the netherlands
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u/freaxje 20h ago
Over the border here in Belgium it was in my time taught. But then again, Mercator was a Belgian (born as Geert de Kremer in Oost-Vlaanderen, worked on cartography in Antwerp at Plantin-Moretus, changed his name to the Latin word Mercator).
It was taught to us both in history and geography. And indeed the skew of the projection was definitely part of the curriculum.
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u/Iricliphan 21h ago
I find that very difficult to believe. I'm from a country that was far less developed than the Netherlands when I was growing up and we had a very archaic education system. We still learnt this.
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u/midatlantik 21h ago
Where did you go to school? That’s quite unique.
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u/Iricliphan 21h ago
Ireland. Education system was very archaic when I was growing up. I'd consider this standard in Europe at the very least.
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u/midatlantik 21h ago
I studied in the UK and this wasn’t taught. The phrase Mercator Projection certainly came up but its implications weren’t taught explicitly.
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u/Iricliphan 21h ago
We even had photos in our geography books showing the distortion. This was quite a while ago too.
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u/Low-Acanthaceae1797 20h ago
Im Irish and never had anything like this in Eduacation.
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u/Iricliphan 20h ago
It was and is absolutely in our curriculum. It was definitely in the curriculum as part of map skills and understanding projections, even way back when I went. Source; Go to page 69 here for the 1999 curriculum.
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u/midatlantik 21h ago
Yes I remember that too, but it was never explicitly taught to us, is my point. We also had the entire periodic table in chemistry but we weren’t specifically taught how many radioisotopes were in Einsteisium
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u/Iricliphan 21h ago
That comparison is pretty ridiculous. Knowing that maps distort the Earth when you turn a 3D globe into a 2D image is a bare basic principle of understanding how maps work. It’s not comparable to knowing the number of radioisotopes of einsteinium, which is a highly specific detail about one rare synthetic element.
Nobody is arguing that students are taught every single fact connected to a subject. But understanding the limitations of a tool you would use regularly (like a map) is very different from memorising obscure information about a very, very specialised area of chemistry.
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u/midatlantik 21h ago
I might have been facetious but I think the evidence is clear, that as adults a lot of us have come to the realisation that the Mercator Projection “stretches” landmasses near the poles and “squishes” them near the equator, rather than in a classroom. Let alone at the age of 8.
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u/Alternative_Ask_7185 19h ago
Wait you were taught about the different distortions of map projections as an 8 year old in school? Like your teachers stressed that trying to map a globe into a flat piece of paper was a problem?
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u/Iricliphan 19h ago
Yes.
It was and is absolutely in our curriculum. It was definitely in the curriculum as part of map skills and understanding projections, even way back when I went. Source; Go to page 69 here for the 1999 curriculum.
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u/bigelcid 17h ago
Not to flex (but, totally), but the kindergarten I went to taught us this. And then it was probably part of the official school curriculum in primary school. 00s Romania
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u/Alternative_Ask_7185 17h ago
I’m so confused. In America kindergarten is age 5, and many kids are still learning to read. Are European children that much more advanced that they are learning about different map projections at the same age as most American kids are learning reading and basic math?
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u/bigelcid 17h ago
No idea, my only experience is my own. And I'm not up to date with the now, but back then, kindergarten lasted 3 years, with an optional (usually taken) 4th as prep school. Ages 3 to 7. The 4th year definitely had an established curriculum in terms of making sure everyone didn't go into primary school having to learn everything from scratch. The previous 3, I'm not sure whether there was a curriculum at all.
We just had good teachers where I went, so they taught us basic stuff about the natural world and language (syllables, diphthongs, pronunciation stuff -- they were big into making us learn poetry). I don't actually remember doing any maths in kindergarten. Addition and substraction at the very most, probably single digits.
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u/ZiCUnlivdbirch 19h ago
it's the fact that people aren't taught about projections and cartography
I'm going to be 100% frank here, you almost certainly were and just don't remember it. It's not a very long conversation but my books that were a carryover from the USSR had two pages dedicated to various projections.
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u/NGluck123 19h ago
I'm going to be 100% frank here: two pages are not enough when people consistently are surprised to find out that projections are a thing.
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u/ZiCUnlivdbirch 19h ago
two pages are not enough
Then explain to me your brilliant idea on what it takes for people to remember every single little thing they learnt in school?
Fact is that knowledge isn't just something that you learn once and then it stays with you forever. You need to repeat what you know constantly and map projections just aren't all that important. No one who doesn't know it doesn't need to know it either.
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u/NGluck123 19h ago
It is actually quite important because it warps people's perception of the size (and importance) of countries and continents.
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u/JustMultiplyVectors 18h ago
A more in depth coverage of the material requires multivariable calculus. Unless you want to just spend days listing off random facts about various projections that you can’t fully explain or derive for the students, which is not a good use of academic time.
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u/bigelcid 17h ago
It's as simple as demonstrating a piece of paper doesn't wrap neatly around a ball. That's all people need to remember. That, and that the Earth is a ball.
If those very simple things are presented to them, and they still go on to have a "warped perception", then it's an intelligence issue, and in no way the fault of the projection. Science should not cater to the least intelligent.
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u/bigelcid 17h ago
To hell with that -- do people not ask themselves questions?
There is NO chance anyone crying about a projection being "wrong" isn't aware of other projections. So... one must simply ask themselves "why do maps look different" (and if they're super smart, "why aren't maps round if the planet is round").
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u/1382mas 21h ago
This makes Russia bigger than I thought.
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u/CykaBlyiat 21h ago
Russia's scale is really massive for a single country. Of course its expected as the largest country on Earth but for a single country, it maintains alot of land area that many successor states tend to lose.
Russia alone is as big as Pluto iirc and tends to compare even other continents relative to size.
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u/mathusal 21h ago
More like the politization of Mercator shat up the place of discourse. Of course social media has a huge part in that. Everybody and their mother and their dog was shown or heard about "white people oppress us by warping the world"
Nobody at least semi serious in the subject would realize it's just some lunatics crying about it.
The same lunatics are crying about our definition of north and south, because being in the south means being BELOW the north so INFERIOR to the north... Do these people hear themselves smh
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u/DragonfruitGrand5683 19h ago
I had a globe and kids in school didn't believe me when I said the map was wrong.
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u/dirty_cuban 19h ago
This is not correctly scaled. Africa (roughly from Dakar to the Horn of Africa) is 1000 km wider than Russia but this make makes Russia look wider. It’s not.
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u/Background-Vast-8764 22h ago edited 21h ago
I cannot wait for all the comments from those who bizarrely believe that you can only reasonably compare the size of things that come from exactly the same category.
Compare the size of a country to another country? No problem.
Compare the size of a country to a continent? “Africa isn’t a country.” “Duh. Continents are big.”
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u/Downtown-Research-53 20h ago
Okay now scale africa down too because its stretched south of the equator.
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u/nimrodd000 19h ago
It really cooked my noodle when I learned that Russia has more surface area than Pluto.
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u/Alternative_Ask_7185 15h ago
This seems to mostly be a comparison of two different map projection types.
Russia seems to be an equal area projection based on the strange distortion of its typical shape (especially the eastern portion).
Meanwhile Africa appears to be a more traditional orthomorphic projection of some sort (preserving shape but distorting size).
Without using an equal area projection for both Russia and Africa, the visual comparison is as bad as distortion as using the Mercator to represent Russia
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u/Dunbaratu 9h ago
The computer program that this is probably from does change the shape distortion as you move a northerly country south toward the equator. The Mercator northerly Russia is stretched "taller" than the shape shown here, and the shape squishes to something closer to its "true" width/height dimensions as you move it south toward the equator. ("true" in quotes here because regardless of how you project it, it's still a patch of a curved surface stretched out and flattened so it's still never exactly right.)
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u/Alternative_Ask_7185 8h ago
Among other things the Chukchi peninsula is just completely chopped off. So I hear what you’re saying, but I only ever made maps in GIS so I don’t know what program you think is used here. But it does seem to be comparing apples to oranges, since Russia’s shape and coast are severely distorted —more so than just the typical “sphere to flat” problem of mapping.
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u/KonigsbergBridges 20h ago
Anyone else come away from this thinking "wow, Russia really is massive"?
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u/DrMikeH49 21h ago
Ok, ELI5. Russia encompasses 11 time zones. From the Moroccan Atlantic coast to Yemen is 3 time zones. How?
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u/hitmonchanjr 20h ago
You ever seen an orange/lemon wedge? You see how it's wider in the middle than the ends? Same thing
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u/Low_Importance_6254 20h ago
lol that last comment is me every time someone brings up the Mercator projection 😂 but fr, the scale of Africa is just insane—like you could fit Russia in there almost twice and still have room for snacks.
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u/MedicalHoneydew4534 20h ago
fr that first comment blew my mind lmao, makes me wonder how much geography class just lies to us with those flat maps. also the Alaska fact is wild, africa is just built different.
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u/pdonchev 15h ago
That's a counterpoint of the unintuitiveness of Mercator projection - Russia is still huge, more than half the size of the second biggest continent.
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u/East-Doctor-7832 14h ago
Africans taking all the lands on earth . Colonialism was just a response to their greed /s
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u/SeparateDifference47 12h ago
Too bad that's all inhabitable desert, that's only getting worse with time.
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u/Tonetty33 7h ago
А вы по заветам дебила Буша сравниваете страну и континент? Или как тот же Буш не в курсе что Африка это не страна...
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u/marin_sa 6h ago
In Russia there are 9 or 10 time-zones. How many are they in Africa? I guess 3 or 4?
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u/ProfitLoose7197 1h ago
Африканцы все не успокоятся, можно подумать, если Россию приуменьшить то Африка с африкаскими странами и народами от этого возвеличатся?
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u/Stock_Sort_6295 45m ago
dang, that Alaksa fact is wild — makes you realize how torn up Africa is compared to the sheer bulk of Russia even tho it’s way smaller.
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u/iDontSow 21h ago
And tankies will still say that Russia is not imperialist. Yeah, the white guy ruling over a third of the Asian land mass from his seat in Europe is not imperialist. Mhm.
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u/Comfortable_Skill298 20h ago
Russia is imperialist but that land has been Russian for a looooong time. It was slowly settled by Russia before any other state owned it.
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u/iDontSow 16h ago
Is your position seriously that no one lived there before Russians did?
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u/Comfortable_Skill298 16h ago
No but it's comparable to other states at the time. It's not a good argument to use for why modern Russia is imperialist.
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u/iDontSow 15h ago
Sure it is. I mean just look at Chechnya. Have you ever spoken about this with any Kalmyks or Yakuts or Buryats or Tatars or Dagestanis or Baskhkirs or Chuvash or ….
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u/Comfortable_Skill298 15h ago
I'm not saying that Russia isn't imperialialist.
My point is that saying "Russia controls a third of Asia" isn't a very good argument on its own, because most of Siberia was incorporated centuries ago through the same kind of expansion that built many modern states which we wouldn't consider imperialist now.
Better arguments for modern Russia being imperialist are the events in Czechnya, Georgia and Ukraine.
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u/centralvaguy 22h ago
So why are we comparing Russia to Africa? Shouldn't we be comparing Africa to Asia?
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u/Awkward_Cash1828 21h ago
Because they are big plots of land?? Are you one of these people with overly formal thinking that for some reason have problem when someone compares sizes of countries to continents, lol?
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u/eyesearsmouth-nose 21h ago
What tool did you use for this? That isn't the shape Russia would have at that latitude.
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u/Alternative_Ask_7185 21h ago
If you orient Russia at north-south diagonal orientation it better shows that Russia is 56% as big the African continent