When geography is not busy dividing people, it is genuinely one of the most fascinating subjects out there. The planet we live on is strange and surprising in ways that most of us never get taught in school, and a lot of what we think we know turns out to be at least a little wrong.
That gap between what people assume and what is actually true is, not coincidentally, also where a lot of the best geography jokes come from.
Take Mount Everest. Most people would confidently tell you it is the tallest mountain on Earth, and they would be technically correct, but only if you measure from sea level. If you measure from base to peak, the title actually belongs to Mauna Kea, a long-dormant volcano in Hawaii.
The reason most people have never heard of it is that around 6,000 meters of it sits underwater in the Pacific Ocean, leaving only about 4,200 meters visible above the surface. Its total height of around 10,200 meters easily beats Everest’s 8,849 meters, it just takes a little more imagination to appreciate.
And if you really want to put Earth’s mountains in perspective, neither Everest nor Mauna Kea comes close to the tallest mountain in the Solar System. Olympus Mons on Mars stands about 21.9 kilometers tall from base to peak, more than twice the height of Mauna Kea.
There is also a strong case to be made for Rheasilvia, a peak within a crater on the asteroid Vesta, which is thought to reach around 22.5 kilometers high. Earth, it turns out, is not particularly impressive in the mountain department.
Most people’s mental image of the world also turns out to be pretty distorted, and that is largely thanks to the map they grew up looking at. The Mercator projection, which was first developed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, became the global standard for navigation and has been plastered on classroom walls ever since.
The problem is that it wildly distorts the size of landmasses, particularly those far from the equator. On a standard Mercator map, Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa, when in reality Africa is about 14 times larger. Alaska looks comparable to Australia, when Australia is actually four and a half times as big.
The distortion runs deep enough that some critics have argued it has genuinely shaped how people think about different parts of the world, making countries near the equator look smaller and, by extension, less significant than they actually are.
For a truly accurate map you would essentially need something the size and shape of the Earth itself. There are websites where you can drag countries around and compare their real sizes to each other, and it is genuinely one of the more disorienting things you can do on the internet.
The shape of the world is not even fixed, which is something that does not get talked about enough. The continents are constantly moving, pushed around by shifting tectonic plates, and the speed at which they do it is roughly the same rate at which human fingernails grow.
For around 40 million years, North America and Africa drifted apart at about one millimeter per year, right in line with average nail growth, before accelerating to around 20 millimeters a year during a particularly active period 200 million years ago. Your fingernails, in other words, are growing at a pace that has literally reshaped the planet.
