Seeing a Different Sea

Over the years, I've seen a lot of thinking and writing about the way various map projections skew our perceptions of the world, and also some pointing out that the way the world (and the globe) is thought of as oriented with up in the north, or north meaning up, has a similar effect.

I don't think I've seen one pointing out the same thing from a side-to-side perspective, but I recently saw an example and I found it even more startling:

This example is from the Twitter feed of Martin O'Neill, a professor of political philosophy and board member of the Democracy Collaborative. He included this about it:

Maps that don’t put North at the top can achieve something remarkable in terms of making you see things afresh. This map of the Mediterranean is amazing in the way that it manages to reduce the distance between Europe and Africa.

In addition to the 90° turn, the cropping of this map also affects my perception: "normal" maps concentrate on the idea that Africa and Europe are separate continents, while this map makes the two land masses look like one thing with a really big lake in the middle.