> The extra distance around Africa looks comparatively small on the Mercator projection.
Compared to what? I.e. what projection or approach would you choose instead of Mercator?
Compared to what? I.e. what projection or approach would you choose instead of Mercator?
That said you can preserve distance in special cases, for example any two chosen points. For example you can go to https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/two-point-equidistant/ and put your points at the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope. While that still won't let you measure wiggly ship routes along the coast, it does a better job than Mercator.
Failing that you can use Gall-Peters which does a better job of conveying the vastness of Africa, since it's area preserving.
You very much can. The scale of longitude and latitude is just not the same so you need to do Pythagoras (usually by approximation rules).
There are usually lines to allow for that.
The mercator makes Africa look comparatively small on the y-axis which is a problem if you are trying to visualise the size of Africa and the time it takes to go around the continent.
If i visually compare the distance on the mercator and an equal area projection is looks to make the trip about 20% shorter on mercator (compared to the apparent visual distance going through Suez). Non of the projections will be 100% accurate but the mercator is less accurate for this specific case.
LOL.
The Suez canal is at ~30°N, while Cape Town is ~35°S. If anything the Mercator projection is exaggerating the visual distance of going around.