This is one area in which a great many people remember things being different. I wasn’t personally aware of it until a short time ago, when I first learned about the Mandela Effect. I hadn’t really bothered to look at the world map in many years, mostly because once you’ve seen it you have a good mental image of how the world looks. Yet when I looked a short time ago… let’s just say my first thought was ‘what the fuck has happened to South America?’ Following that I took a closer look and found other inconsistencies between the map as it stands today, and my own memory. Now let me be clear, I had a world atlas book as a child, and a globe, and the map of the world was often put on the walls of geography classrooms at high school. I saw the map often enough growing up to know what it looked like, and the current does not match my memory. Let me begin with a picture of the world today:

Take a careful look at this image, and ask yourself if this is consistent with your own memory. The discrepancies I spotted are as follows:

• South America is smaller, and thinner at the southern tip and much too far East. In my memory this continent is larger and sits directly below the United States.
• The Island of New Zealand is too far South, it should be on the same latitude as the northern half of Australia.
• There was no such country as Mongolia, as it had been conquered by China centuries ago and was thus that land was considered part of China.
• Spain was much further away from Morocco.
• Italy and Sicily were spaced further apart, and Italy looked more like a boot than a high heeled shoe.
• The Mediterranean sea was larger.
• Greenland was about half the size.
• Africa was bigger.
• The island of Madagascar was smaller.
• Russia and Alaska were not so close on the globe.
• The Atlantic ocean was about twice as big.
• The Pacific ocean, while the largest, did NOT cover almost half the planet.

I would recommend taking a look on Google Earth to take a look properly at the oceans and positioning of continents. If you don’t want to download it then alternatively you can watch this youtube video made by a guy in Australia, who goes through the changes made to the map using Google Earth.

Some people on the Internet are trying to reconstruct how Earth used to look before the timeline and reality was tampered with, and here are a couple of images that may help jog your memory if you’re not sure or convinced yet.

This image is somewhat more accurate to my memory, although not correct in it’s entirety. South America and Africa are the right size and shape, and in the right places, as is Spain. New Zealand still looks wrong and Greenland is still too large, but that said this is much more accurate.

This map still has South America the wrong shape and still A BIT too far East, but New Zealand is right and the size of Greenland is right. Now look at the Atlantic ocean, this is how it looked, it’s certainly the same size as I recall it on the maps from when I was in school.

Now you’ve seen the current official map, what do you think? Which map most accurately reflects your memory? It’s wholly possible that you only remember the current map. It seems very unlikely to me that such a large number of people can misremember so many things about the world we live on, so what’s going on?

Multiverse theory

Clearly all of these maps cannot have been accurate say, 15-20 years ago, unless we allow for one of two theories. In the first theory, we allow for multiple time lines and realities, a multiverse. Under this theory, there are an infinite number of parallel universes, some of which are radically different from ours to the point of the laws of physics being completely different. However, some of those universes are extremely similar to the one which we live in, and if two or more of these similar universes merge, or if we slide between them then we may not immediately know that something is different. It is very possible that some of us remember other universes because we were native to those universes and not this one. This raises some interesting questions if this is true:

• If we also existed in another universe and this timeline, which we remember, then what happened to our counterpart from the universe we currently live in?
• Did we just vanish from our original universe, or did we just swap places with our counterpart?
• When did this happen?
• How did it happen? Is it a natural or technological phenomenon?

Time Travel Theory

Alternatively, if we allow for just one universe and timeline, we must allow for time travel and timeline edits. In other words, current reality has been changed because someone or something has changed events in the past, thus re-writing everything from that point onwards. If this theory is accurate, we have to ask the following questions:

• Why have most peoples memories been changed, but some of us remember how things were?
• What parts of history have been changed?
• Who or what is responsible for these changes? Natural or not?
• If a person or organization is responsible, do they reside in the past, the present or the future?

I’m leaning more towards the first theory personally, although it could be a mixture of the two. The second might explain occurrences such as dead people being alive and company logos being different, but it doesn’t explain why the map is different. In a slightly different universe it is possible and even likely that the geology of the planet is a little different in each universe and so of course the map will be different. Actually we’re lucky it isn’t even more different than it is. It’s still Earth, just not OUR Earth.