Distribution of land masses on the earth

People who have desired to reach knowledge about the world they live in, have begun to produce various maps for the visualization of the earth surface after the geographical discoveries. The earliest known world maps belongs to 6th to 5th centuries BCE. They are based on flat earth paradigm. After the world was regarded as geoid, techniques have enhanced with major changes and cartography has jumped into the era. The plane separating the earth into two parts as the northern and southern hemispheres is called the equator. The planes that are parallel to the equatorial plane are intersected with the globe and called as "parallel circles". The total number of paralel circles are 180. They are equally spaced in the north (90) and south (90). The planes intersected with the globe, passing through the poles and called as "meridian circles". The prime meridian, assumed to have passed through the Royal Observatory in London is "Greenwich meridian". Meridian circles are 360 in total, with each number of 180 equally spaced in the east and west. The angle of the equatorial plane with the line that connect the center of the sphere and a point on the sphere is geographic latitude (φ) of that point. The angle between the meridian plane that passes through that point and the greenwich meridian's plane is geographic longitude (λ). The φ and λ values are geographical coordinates of a point. There are some assumptions about the physical earth to be portrayed, depending on the scale of the map. The task of the cartographer is to portray objects and information of the earth by enriching the communication with some cartographic presentation methods on a flat paper, fineness and accuracy that may be necessary for the user. Due to irregularity of the earth's shape which is geoid, a plenetary body (reference surface model) must have chosen. The reference surface model used for the designing of small world maps produced for cartographic purposes is sphere. Coinciding the surface model with the topography of the area properly is important. With the help of the intermediary surfaces such as cone, cylinder and plane, surface image of earth is defined according to a specific coordinate system on the reference surface model is transferred into a plane by established mathematical relations and/or geometrical relations. Map projections are named according to the intermediary surfaces: Cylindrical, Azimuthal and Conic Projections. Maps have some metric properties such as; area, shape, direction, bearing, distance and scale. When the earth surface is projected on to the intermediary surfaces, the geometry of the points on these surface necessarily change with respect to each other. As a consequence of the geometry (position) change, the distance values, the angle values between the directions and the area values on the projection surface inevitably differ from their original values on the surface, ie during the producing maps with the map projections, some deformations (distortions) occur. Map projections can be derived from geometric relationships between the original surface and the intermediary surface with the aid of trigonometric relations. The principle of projection can be shown and explained on a geometric figure. Projections in this feature are called Geometric (Real) Projections. Projections that are defined by only mathematical relations are called Pseudo Projections. Since there is no geometric relationship, it is not possible to speak of a intermediary surface. However, they are inspired from geometric projections, so they named under those projections' category. Moreover, the normal point at which the plane is in contact with the original surface is the rotation axis of the cylinder or cone. If this axis is coincident with the line that merges the north and south poles, it is defined as Normal (Polar) Projections. The case where the axis is in the equatorial plane is called Transversal (Equatorial) Projections. Otherwise located projections are Oblique Projections. Projection designs can be developed where the angle, area, or distance deformations are limited to specific values. On the other hand, every projection preserves and/or regulate its metric properties in a different ways. In the case of preservation of angles (at the same time, the shape is preserved) they are called Conform Projections. If the distances are maintained over certain directions, they are called as Equidistant Projections. If the areas are preserved, those are Equal-Area (Equivalent) Projections. For instance, projections can preserve both the area and the distance in one or at most two directions. The same thing is valable for Conform Projections. Nonetheless, every three of them can not be preserved, or both the area and the angle preservation feature is out of the question. Each different projection defines a different globes and maps. Map projections are often referred to by the name of the designer and/or the name of the category to which it belongs. In this study, the geographical distribution of land masses over the globe were calculated. Recently, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are useful for coordinate transformations and defining projection owing to extensive projection library in related software. GIS establish relation between the data with geography. GIS has several simple ideas: creating geographic data, managing, analyzing it and displaying it on a map. Cartographers were producing paper maps regularly before GIS. Over the years, instead of analog production, designing digital maps with computer-based spatial data, visualization, image processing and database software became popular and convenient. There are many tools to analyze and classify data, implement acquired parts, and obtain results. In ArcGIS software, five different equal-area projections are defined for the calculation of land areas. Equal-area projections were used to avoid area deformations. These projections are; Albers Equal Area Conic, Lambert Equal Area Cylindrical, Mollweide and Hammer-Aitoff projections. The Hammer-Aitoff equal-area projection is a modification of the Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection. Some of these projections are still used in the production of world maps. Chosen projections were defined after creating grid interval of 1o and 5o in ArcGIS software, the areas of latitude zones and meridian lunes and the land areas in this zone and lunes were calculated. The ratio of the land areas to the total land areas and the ratio of these land areas to zones and lunes which they belong were obtained. There are 36 latitudes and 72 longitudes in a 5o graticule. In a 1o graticule, there are 180 latitudes and 360 longitudes. There is a loss of 5 degrees in the north and south hemispheres in the latitude zones due to a data problem. For this reason, there are 34 latitudes in a 5o graticule and 174 latitudes in a 1o graticule. Furthermore, there is a loss of 1 degree in east longitudes. The results are presented on tables and visualized in bar graphs. The usage of both 1o and 5o graticules is significant for comparison of the results. Thus, an inventory regarding the distribution of current land areas over the globe has been prepared. This inventory, for instance; can be considered as the initial period data which can be used for the analysis of possible changes of the glaciers caused by global warming effect.