varies source to source, if you honestly believe there is one absolute measurement or one universal way of measuring countries, you are incredibly wrong but don’t get me wrong I’m not saying they vary but a lot, just a little, don’t over exaggerate. (in short, everything is an approximation)
everything is an approximation my guy, and plus the perimeter can help you determine the area, idk if you knew that, but determining a good approximation of a country’s area is very complicated, a quick google search could tell you that, its not just as simple as length by height like geometry
Gonna paste something from Google, as your idea of land area measurement is very unusual;
Traditionally, the math used for calculating the area of irregular shapes is called coordinate geometry and is a system of geometry where the position of points on an X and Y axis grid is described using an ordered pair of numbers. The grids X and Y axis has both a negative and positive scale with the origin of them at the zero position. Provided each of the plotted points is ordered A,B,C etc a table of points can be built.
These points represent coordinates and, with some clever math, can be used to calculate the square area in imperial or metric systems.
Applications can overlay this drawing grid (described above) on top of a Google Map which in turn informs the drawing scale.
Being able to draw and input the length of a known object allows for the drawing grid scale to be calculated and set automatically.
This essentially allows for the area and perimeter of any image to be calculated using coordinate geometry and simple drawing tools.
tl;dr: coastline measurement literally has absolutely nothing to do with land area measurement. As I’ve been saying the two are determined in separate methods, not one used to find the other.
I’m not saying this is wrong but I couldn’t find anything anywhere about coordinate geometry being used for determining a land’s area, plus correct me if I’m wrong but would the points set on the perimeter of the area? Oh right and let me be clear on something, I said you could use the perimeter to find an area and you can, its just common sense I would think, of course they are other methods of course independent of one another if that wasn’t obvious, I am not disputing that. All I was saying was that it could be done.
Using perimeter to find the area of a country?
You’ve just contradicted your own statements on this point. It is impossible to find the precise perimeter of a country due to the fractal variations involved in coastline and border measurement.
Coordinate geometry is the method used by survey teams worldwide when measuring land area. There’s actually several computer programs that help them with this, which I omitted out of my above comment to avoid advertising. The entire process is digital now, which eliminates a significant part of the margin of error.
I see no contradiction, you can approximate the perimeter, all current measurements are approximations as it regardless of if its digital or not. Plus again, the points used would be on the perimeter so… ye…
We’re going wayyy off topic now
Anyways, original point: the land area officially released by various sources is relatively accurate.
I’ll look into it some more and recalculate everything, thanks for pointing out that my data was wrong lmao