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| - The map shared online moderately exaggerated the size of Texas; however it was more or less an accurate representation of the state's vastness.
A photo shared to Facebook on Oct. 11, 2024, claimed to show an outline of the state of Texas laid over a map of Europe, highlighting the Lone Star State's immense size as it covered large portions of five Western European nations.
The post, which had amassed more than 17,000 reactions as of this writing, was captioned: "After Seeing These 15 Maps You'll Never Look At The World The Same."
Hayley Drennon, senior research assistant at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said via email that yes, "Texas really is THAT big."
However, the state's borders were moderately exaggerated in the Facebook post, which made its representation only mostly true. Nonetheless, the true vastness of Texas, as outlined below, is not far off.
To replicate the map, Drennon downloaded the Texas State Boundary shapefile, a location and geographic dataset, from the Texas Department of Transportation (TDT). She then reprojected the state using the Environmental Systems Research Institute's (ESRI) ArcPro Software, a geographic information system that maintains data sources to create maps. These open-source databases are provided to researchers, institutions, and governments for mapping-specific needs.
Drennon created a similar map overlay below.
(Courtesy of Hayley Drennon / TDT / ESRI)
Though Drennon's creation is similar to the one in the Facebook post, a side-by-side comparison (pictured below) shows Texas' boundaries are moderately exaggerated in the Facebook post.
For example, the Facebook version shows El Paso County — in the western portion of the Lone Star State — stretching close to the Spain-France border, whereas in Drennon's creation El Paso County lies farther north. Likewise, the southernmost tips of Pharr County nearly reach Rome, Italy, in the Facebook post, whereas in Drennon's it is also farther north.
(Snopes compilation Facebook/@myamericatravel, Drennon)
Drennon noted that the size difference may be a matter of projection, or how a two-dimensional map is translated onto a three-dimensional globe. She likened this to wrapping a circular object – people may have different methods for wrapping and, depending on their technique, the wrap of the paper might look or drape differently.
"Depending on what type of projection a person uses, their shape map might be slightly different," she said. Drennon added that the map on the left of the above compilation is also slightly different in shape and uses more detail than the version she used, which she created from official data published by the TDT.
The Facebook post's map appeared to be created using a website called The True Size. Its "About" page said:
It is hard to represent our spherical world on flat piece of paper. Cartographers use something called a "projection" to morph the globe into 2D map. The most popular of these is the Mercator projection.
Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems. One of the most common criticisms of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries nearer the poles (US, Russia, Europe), while downplaying the size of those near the equator (the African Continent). On the Mercator projection Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles, nearly 14 and a half times larger.
This app was created by James Talmage and Damon Maneice. It was inspired by an episode of The West Wing and an infographic by Kai Krause entitled "The True Size of Africa". We hope teachers will use it to show their students just how big the world actually is.
The Lone Star State has a land area of 261,193.9 square miles and a water area of 7,330.9 square miles, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Combined, that's a 268,524.8 square mile area within Texas state borders.
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