As geographer Mark Monmonier claims, “Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it’s essential. Today the Mercator projection is used as a template at Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and Bing, says Kraak.įrom guiding 16th century explorers on the high seas to helping people find Pokemons on their smartphones, Mercator’s work continues to influence how people see the world centuries after his death.All maps lie. In the US and Germany, for example, maps based on the so-called Winkel Tripel projection, which has a smaller skewness, started to replace the Mercator in the 1920s.īut the Mercator still dominates and the digital revolution has further strengthened its position. Other alternative maps are being introduced around the world too. In order to show the actual size of land masses, their shapes are distorted.īoston Public Schools are rolling out the new maps in all second, seventh and eleventh grades for now, and aim to place them in all classrooms in the future. Because the earth is a sphere – more of a potato-shape, in fact – it is impossible to map it on a flat surface without errors in proportion, explains Kraak.Īlso the Peters projection has its flaws. Sadly, there is no such thing as a perfect map. Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images In truth, it is no bigger than the Democratic Republic of Congo.Ĭhart of the world as per Mercator's projection, circa 1798, with the most recent discoveries. The distortion is largest near the poles: Greenland, which looks about the same size as the whole of Africa on the Mercator, is a classic example.
On the Mercator map, Africa – sitting on the equator, reasonably undistorted – is left looking much smaller than it really is.īut Canada, Russia, the United States and Europe are greatly enlarged. The repercussions of this are still being felt today. While a revolutionary tool for captains and explorers, the projection distorts the relative size of the continents, to the advantage of the West.
Mercator’s solution was to stretch out the northern and southern extremities of the globe to fill those gaps, producing an elegant and usable map. Taking the equator as the logical map center left big, confusing gaps near the poles. Later transferring his map from a three-dimensional curved surface to a flat sheet of paper was problematic. The 1569 Mercator projection was made for navigating the seas – drawing the meridians and parallels as straight lines that cross at right angles helped sailors to navigate some of the their first treacherous voyages around the world.