The Map You Grew Up with Is a Lie, This Is What the World Really Looks Like

Pierre Van ZylLearn, News + Discoveries

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The world is not quite what it seems. Most of the maps you see day-to-day are based on Mercator projection. Designed almost 450 years ago, even Google Maps used a variant of this projection until just a few months ago.

However, as you can see below, it’s surprisingly bad at accurately reflecting the true size of many countries.

Before we look further into how the Mercator projection is flawed, it’s important to understand what “map projection” is.

What Is Map Projection?

For millennia, people have created numerous types of maps that all emphasize different things from waterways and trade routes to the best coffee in town and the constellations. Map projection is a method that takes the Earth’s curved surface and depicts it on something flat like a screen or a wall.

But, if you ever tried to make a blow-up globe flat – just like the gentleman in the video below does – you will quickly realize, once again, that countries that were once small become large and vice versa, as well as the fact that turning a sphere into a rectangle is impossible.

Neil Kaye, a climate data scientist at the Met Office in the UK, has designed a map visualization that alternates between the Mercator projection and true projections of a country’s area relative to other countries. The GIF elegantly shows how the Mercator projection distorts the true size of many countries, especially those further away from the equator.

Just take a look at how severely Russia, Canada, and Greenland changed size. Europe, parts of Asia, and the US also shrink away a considerable amount. The Mercator projection depicts Greenland as a landmass larger than Africa, however, in reality, Africa’s area is a whopping 14 times greater than Greenland’s.

“Each country is projected to the spherical projection and placed at the center of where it appears in the Natural Earth projection,” Kaye explained on Reddit.

“There was then some manual tweaking of countries that are closer to the poles,” he added.

“This demonstrates you can’t fit shapes on a sphere back together again once you put them on the flat.”

The Mercator projection was first presented by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It’s been extremely useful for exploration as it allows a navigator to plot a straight-line course and maintains the country’s true shape, but when you translate a three-dimensional shape, such as a globe, into a two-dimensional projection, something’s got to give. In this case, it’s distorting size and distance as you get closer to the two poles.

The Mercator projection has also been accused of having political undertones by presenting a Eurocentric colonial view of the world. As a result of all of these biases and shortcomings, some schools in Boston even decided to get rid of the map in favor of the alternative Gall-Peters world map. However, this projection isn’t “perfect� either. While it preserves the area measure of the landmass more accurately, it distorts its shape.

In August 2018, cartographers released the Equal Earth projection map in the hopes of overcoming all of the problems found with the world’s numerous map projections. The debates within cartography (of which there are many) will undoubtedly continue to rumble on, but the scientists of Twitter appeared to be pretty satisfied with the results.

Shared with permission from our friends at IFL Science. The Hearty Soul has incorporated additional information to make it even better for you, our reader!

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