For many people, summer is vacation time. For some, it’s a time to get out the maps, get the car serviced, and hit the open road. For others, it’s a time to purchase guide books and book flights. But wherever we go in the world, most of us need to know where we are relative to other places. That’s why maps were made.
We all grew up studying maps, but there’s one problem we weren’t aware of when we were young. Maps of the world, in particular, are wildly inaccurate pictures of the world as it exists. The problem comes from trying to transpose a round globe onto a flat surface.
In 1569, Gerardus Mercator produced what is known as the mercator projection as a aid to navigation. The projection is relatively accurate around the equator, but much more distorted the further you move north or south. Imagine slicing the rind of an orange and laying it out on a flat surface. The center of the orange would basically conform to the surface, but the ends, representing the poles of the earth, would have to be spread to cover the same space.
A projection misrepresents the relative size of land masses. For example, in the Mercator projection, Greenland appears roughly the same size as Africa. But in fact, Africa is some thirteen times the size of Greenland. Alaska appears slightly larger than Brazil while Brazil is five times larger.
In other words, nations in the southern hemisphere come out smaller, and thus may appear less consequential, than nations in the north. This gives a dominant appearance to North America and Europe while diminishing South America and Africa.
This problem was corrected by later elliptical projections, which distort the shape rather than the size of the areas. Areas near the equator are stretched vertically, while those far away are squashed.
In 1989, a resolution was passed by seven North American geographical groups objecting to the use of all rectangular-coordinate world maps.
Despite advances, Internet maps rely on the older model because it enables panning and zooming to local maps. |
