In this video, we're going to use the RGIS geography visualizer to visualise the location and size of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Now the first thing I'm going to do here is change the base map. This currently is an imagery hybrid base map, and it essentially means we've got the satellite imagery with the borders of the country superimposed on top. But I think this task's gonna be a little bit easier if I change the base map. So I'm going to come to the bottom toolbar. I'm going to click on base maps and I'm going to choose a chartered territory map. And this is really clearly shows different countries, because they use a core system, which makes it very easy to pick out countries against a different country. So that's one really useful thing. The other thing is it's got important geographical reference points like the equator here. So I think there's two good reasons to use this map. So we can see the content of Africa in the centre of the screen at the moment. And as you may know, the Democratic Republic of Congo is in the centre of Africa. Now, we could use the search tool in the top left-hand corner, but if you look carefully in the middle of the screen, we can see DR Congo, which stands for the Democratic Republic of Congo in the centre of the the screen. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit to have a look at this. So we can see straight away that in terms of location, we can see that it's in Central Africa. We can see there's a reference point of the equator running right the way through the Democratic Republic of Congo. So it is an equatorial country. The equator runs through the centre of the Democratic Republic of Congo. We can also see a series of countries that border the Democratic Republic of Congo. And you see that this, because it's a fairly big country, we can see quite a lot. So I'll leave you to have a look at which of these countries are. The one that I will point out though is this, where it says Congo just to the west of the DRC. I'll sometimes use DRC for short for the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is the Republic of Congo. It's a separate country. So it's important to distinguish between these two places. So that's where the DRC is. Now what about size? We can see it looks a fairly big country, doesn't it, in the centre of Africa. But what we would like to do is to be a bit more specific than just saying it's quite big. We want to be able to measure it and give some sort of a value. So the way we're gonna do this is we're gonna come to the bottom toolbar and we're going to click on measure and then a little popup will come up and we can click measure again. And I'm going to go to the popup and click measure area. And what I can do here is I can do a very rough, and I'm going to make it quite rough. I'm not going do the border precisely, but I'm going to do a rough outline around the DRC just to give me an idea of its size for comparison. So, there we go. We go down this border with Uganda, past Rwanda and Tanzania and Zambia, and we double click to finish the measurement. You can see at the moment it's got it in miles. If I go to the popup, I can change that where it says units, I can change it to metric and then it'll come up with kilometres. So 2,350,796. 55 kilometres square. That gives you an idea of the size of the DRC. Now as a comparison, you might think we can just have a look at it and think about whether it's bigger or smaller than other countries on this map. So it's, you know, bigger than France, isn't it? Maybe France and can maybe half of Germany together or something. The problem with that though is that this is a map on a flat screen. So a 2D screen. And when we take a globe and we try and put it on a flat surface, we have to distort it to make it work. And this is based on the Maketa version, Maketa projection I should say. And what it does is it stretches things in the north and south. So we've gotta be really careful about this and make sure that we're not kind of assuming that this is a size that it's not. So what I'm going to do, instead of just assuming, I'm going to measure another country as a visual reference. Now we can see Greenland up here, which you would expect to be an awful lot bigger by the looks of this map, but let's have a look to find out if that's correct. So I'm going to click measure and measure area and I'm going to just very quickly go around Greenland. Now Greenland's coastline comes in and out quite a lot, so we have to sort of take an average point of where we think the perimeter is, but there we go. That's the area of Greenland. And if I change it to metric, we've then got a comparison. And you may be surprised to learn that it's over 2 million kilometres square, but it's actually smaller than the DRC and this is simply because of the distortion on this map projection. So what that shows us is the Democratic Republic of Congo is a really, really big country. Often on these maps it's made to look significantly smaller, because it's at the equator rather than at a high latitude in the north or south. So it's important to realise that when we're thinking about the scale of this country and we're studying its geography.