"My academic grandfather, Arthur Robinson, said it made the continents look like long underwear hung on a line to dry." "One alternative to Mercator's projection that was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s is the Gall-Peters projection, which is equal-area, but quite ugly," Edney said. So, given the Mercator projection is flawed when it comes to its capacity to represent size, are there any other world maps that we should be using instead? Similarly, Alaska is represented as being around three times bigger than Mexico, when in fact Mexico is around 1.3 times bigger.Ī map with the Gall-Peters projection. To put this in context, Greenland and Africa appear to be similar in size on the Mercator projection, when in reality Africa is nearly 14 times larger, according to Scientific American. "This distortion is usually described in terms of the relative sizes of Greenland, Europe, Africa and India - the former two shown "larger" than they should be, the latter pair much smaller. The result of this is that some regions look far bigger on the map than they are in reality, while others are drawn much smaller. On the map, therefore, there is increasing vertical stretching as one moves poleward." "On the globe, parallels are equally spaced, but to get the special property of great circles and straight lines, Mercator's projection exponentially increases the separation of parallels as one moves poleward. Related: Who was the first person to write about the British Isles? Every parallel is stretched to the length of the equator, so on the map, there is horizontal stretching as one moves poleward.
But, when mapping the Earth into a rectangle, the poles are stretched from points into lines the length of the equator. On the globe, meridians converge as they approach a pole, and the lengths of parallels of latitude grow shorter until the pole. "This combination of properties," continued Edney, "produces significant areal distortions. The projection is conformal and also has the special property that great circles are straight lines," Edney said.Ī great circle is "defined as any circle drawn on a globe with a center that includes the center of the globe", according to ThoughtCo, an educational resource website. "Mercator's projection is the classic example. "Some projections distort more than others," Edney said. (Image credit: BardoczPeter via Getty Images)
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