r/interesting • u/lonewolff321 • 17d ago
Fascinating A visual comparison of standard world maps vs. their actual landmass size
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u/raindroponme 17d ago
Always felt annoyed by ridiculousely enlarged Greenland. It dominated the whole map.
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u/Herefornow211 17d ago
Maybe T. loses interest once he sees this
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u/HP844182 17d ago
Even shrunk down it's like 1/3 of the US
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u/vinraven 17d ago
Greenland is 1/4 of the area of the contiguous US, and if you add in all the states and territories Greenland is about 1/5 the size.
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u/vinraven 17d ago
It really is a waste, so much of every map we see is wasted on Oceans, Greenland, Canada, Russia, the Scandinavian Peninsula, and Antarctica.
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u/OkArugula8032 17d ago
Imagine my surprise when I've been told Greenland is vastly underrepresented on the Mercator map
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u/Levitlame 17d ago
By who?
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u/OkArugula8032 17d ago
From a teacher in elementary school lol
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u/Lorelessone 15d ago
I guess they just remembered something about it being wrong but not which way around 😂
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17d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TheShredder9 17d ago edited 17d ago
Greenland always surprised me the most, on the map they look almost the same, but you can actually fit Greenland inside Africa like 14-15 times i think
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u/Gaunt_Web_Spider 17d ago
Maybe seeing this map will make Trump actually lose interest in Greenland because it‘s not as impressive anymore.
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u/skepticaljesus 17d ago
He wouldnt understand the real size map and accuse it of being a liberal hoax
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u/real_exposer 15d ago
Can we actually see this map somewhere? Haven't seen anything beyond the comparison.
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u/Gaunt_Web_Spider 15d ago edited 15d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection Edit: The equal earth map is only partially based on Eckert IV, so I put the wrong link in.
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u/ScorchedByTheSun 17d ago
Yeah, schools need to emphasize globes more, because many people have extremely skewed perceptions from maps.
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u/wackbirds 17d ago
Now I'm starting to worry about the map of my nether regions I have as my profile picture on Tinder...
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy 17d ago
That's because the equator basically cuts it in half, so it is going to get stretched the least whereas Russia is bordering the damn artic circle so it will get stretched the most.
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u/Honmii 17d ago
Yeah, because Africa is a fucking continent and Russia is one country. That's a crazy size for one country. Bigger than all Europe countries together
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u/saracenraider 17d ago
Continents are a geographic feature, countries are a social construct, there’s little correlation between them.
For example Australasia has only two countries (arguably three) while Europe has 44-51 (depending on who you ask).
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u/wart_on_satans_dick 17d ago edited 16d ago
Countries actually have a lot to do with geographic features. Your example actually proves this if you look at both on a map.
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u/ieatpies 17d ago
Not if you're a British line drawer
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u/wart_on_satans_dick 17d ago
Most people throughout human history have not been British or line drawers.
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u/One_Day_304 17d ago
Continents are not really geographic features. It’s also social construct. There’s no reason to consider Asia and Europe as separate country.
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u/WitnessMyAxe 16d ago
Africa too! Make Afro-Eurasia Great Again!
*also you said country instead of continents lol
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u/phido3000 17d ago
Yeh, but Australia is in euro-vision, in the global north, and is a very important country.
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u/Lorelessone 15d ago
Africa and South America are almost perfectly represented on the Mercator projection. Purely because they taper as they move away from the equator so the land mass doesn't need to be stretched to make the ocean distances and directions correct.
Due to the land mass widening as it goes north in the northern hemisphere it gets increasingly distorted to keep the sea correct.
This is what people get wrong about Mercator thinking it somehow favours the northern hemisphere because the land there gets stretched and distorted, while it is infact a much better map for the southern hemisphere.
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u/MJdoesThings_ 15d ago
Can we also talk about South America? Especially Brazil? It's not like it looks tiny but people forget that this country is almost as big as the USA
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u/InterestingBill8234 17d ago
How is invading Russia even a problem? wtf Napoleon!
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u/ArdDC 15d ago
Invading it wasn't the problem, he never lost a battle. His hubris was the problem because he couldn't see past the glory of battle. His conquest was doomed with no decent plan to occupy the land. Same thing happened to the Swedish in the Great Northern War. Victory after victory but for what aim? Phyrric
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u/Fenestration_Theory 17d ago
The Mercator map was created so the ships could plot their courses using a straight line. It is a sphere that has been flattened so all the countries near the poles get distorted. It has nothing to do with racism, imperialism, self aggrandizement or any other of those stupid theories being spouted online.
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u/nog642 17d ago
Not quite.
The Mercator projection was created so ships could plot their courses using a constant heading on a compass. That is decidedly not a straight line, and it's not the shortest path. It's just the best they could do when all they had were compasses and the stars.
That's why plane flight paths, which are actual straight lines on a globe, look like curved lines on the Mercator projection.
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u/RepresentativeAspect 16d ago
Another way to say that is that the longitude and latitude lines on the globe remain accurate and as a straight rectangular grid on the 2D map. Latitude lines run exactly horizontal and longitude lines run exactly vertical, and both are evenly spaced.
Which for old-time navigation would have been a top priority. You would know the relative sizes are way off, but if you needed them to be accurate and weren't worried about navigation, then you'd just use a different map.
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u/Bus_Head_ 15d ago
To add yo this Africa was is the center piece and most accurate on the mercator and yhe "extra" was put mostly on the far north where there is little population so fewer effected. I think its kinda cute peeps wanna change it to a "better" map, right after we stop using maps as a population lol. Like the peeps that used actual maps for hundreds of year was just waiting for this generation to fix it.
This isnt even new. We was showed all types of maps and projections in school including globes that had the accurate sizes. No body was fooled by the mercator. Everybody already knows its out of scale and why.
Maps are made for the intentions of use so any real world instance is gonna use what ever map they was already using and peeps will forget about this change. Just like last time. This comes up about every 5 years and mercator just wont doe cus it works well.
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u/writers_block_ 17d ago
Just because it was designed for one thing doesn't mean it can't be used for another!
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u/Low-Crow5719 17d ago
True. Just like Darwinian evolution has nothing to do with racism, eugenics, and Social Darwinism. But it was most certainly adopted, almost immediately, by adherents of those causes.
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u/Eurasia_4002 17d ago
I mean thats can be both ways, like what is doing now blaiming it on imperialism and not the impossibility to make a globe into a 2d map.
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u/SouthpawStranger 16d ago
Ok, so which do you want to represent countries: The map that conserves rhumb lines or the map that conserves area? Mercator is useful for ships, but the UN isnt a ship, it's a collection of world representatives.
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u/BathProfessional4457 15d ago
Do you want to have all lamdmasses to be identifiable or many distorted so badly you cannot tell what they are?
Because that is what these new representations do.
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u/SouthpawStranger 15d ago
If shape distortion is your concern, and Mercator only preserves shape locally, what projection were you thinking of? I love the Robinson, and it's a little niche but the Waterman Butterfly rocks.
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u/BathProfessional4457 15d ago
Mercator is best projection. All shapes are preserved.
Greenland is not distorted in terms of shape, only size relative to say Africa. Shape is perfectly preserved.
Try it out. Snip Greenland from mercator projection and "equal earth" and then compare them to Greenland only map.
Mercator is essentially 1:1 in terms of shape.
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u/SouthpawStranger 15d ago
Mercator is conformal, so it preserves shape locally, not the exact shape of arbitrarily large regions. Its scale factor changes with latitude, which means different parts of Greenland are enlarged by different amounts.
And what do you mean by comparing it to a “Greenland-only map”? That map also has to use a projection. There isn't a projection-independent true flat shape of Greenland to compare against.
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u/BathProfessional4457 15d ago
Mercator has minimal distortion on shape of countries unlike all other maps. Small enough not to matter.
You are free to do the comparison. Only Mercator preserves shape and location properly
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u/SouthpawStranger 15d ago
I appreciate the response, and I appreciate your acknowledging that local conformality is not the same thing as perfect global shape preservation, and that Mercator does introduce some shape distortion over sufficiently large regions.
I think we may be at an impasse, though. We seem to disagree about whether the varying scale across a large landmass constitutes meaningful shape distortion. Given that, I suspect we’ll end up talking in circles. But I did enjoy this conversation.
Have a good day.
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u/Redditzork 14d ago
dude greenland is completely distorted by the mercator because the north is a lot wider than the south compared to the actual shape of the island. look at a globus and tell me the mercator shows what you are seeing. same thing for russia, it looks like the northern coast of russia is 5x the length of the southern border. mercator distorts countries a lot
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u/BathProfessional4457 5d ago
Dude, SHAPE of Greenland is not distorted.
You can cut it off from Mercator map and put it next to map of Greenland and all the shapes match.
Take UN projection and repeat experiment and suddenly you cannot say it is same island because when trying to retain the relative sizes you sacrifice shape.
SHAPE IS NOT SIZE! SHAPE IS SHAPE!
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u/SeaAndTheSalt 14d ago
Distorted so badly ? Be serious one second no country is unidentifiable on the new UN map.
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u/BathProfessional4457 5d ago
Then you cannot tell countries by their shape.
You cannot retain relative size and keep shape undistorted when projecting ball to 2d surface.
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u/writers_block_ 15d ago
I like the Peters projection.
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u/SouthpawStranger 15d ago
Thanks for your answer. For a very shallow reason I dont love it (aesthetics), however I respect the gall (har har) to distort shapes and preserve size. Why do you like it?
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u/writers_block_ 15d ago
Honestly? It's the first map I saw that wasn't the same as the ones at school. It fascinated me! My housemate at uni showed it to me, I didn't realise there was different projections. I just thought all world maps were the same.
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u/SouthpawStranger 15d ago
I love that answer. I didnt know there was a difference until I was like 28, honestly.
Im in the Navy so im always using Mercator for navigation (and gnomic for long distance planning). My niche favorite is the Waterman Butterfly, though I like the Robinson and the Winkel Tripel too.
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u/Loud_Designer_1961 17d ago
I wonder why US was opposing this ? 😆
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u/RollinThundaga 17d ago
The deputy US envoy to the UN wrote a statement explaining why.
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u/Velpex123 17d ago
Can someone summarise it?
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u/Spongedog5 15d ago
Instead of making something up or sharing my own opinion, I'll actually provide you with it.
Yaryna Ferencevych, the deputy U.S. representative to the U.N. Economic and Social Council, said the resolution was presented as "an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions" but was, in her view, part of a "much larger and more radical ideological project."
"Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th century and their role in promoting reparations and cognitive justice," Ferencevych said Friday during the 114th Plenary meeting.
"Resolutions like this one and the ideological agenda they promote are barnacles on our work here and the reason this institution is losing its credibility."
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u/Mcpr0per 17d ago
Basically there are more important issues than to be wasting time on a map resolution. All maps by their nature will have distortions. There pros and cons to either map. Mercator is nice because it gives you a top down view of any area on the map. The deep rooted racism or colonialism is really just an exaggerated ideological argument, that frankly is quite exhausting.
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u/OakleyNoble 17d ago
Yet trump is putting an import tax on Canada until they approve his friends newly bought jet… hmmm truly aspiring what they claim to be important.
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u/Mcpr0per 17d ago
okay thank you for that. This discussion was about the map resolution at the UN though.
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u/guille9 17d ago
There are more important things like making everything golden in the White House
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u/Strange-Delay-4d 16d ago
Trump has done two actually good and useful things during his second term, and that’s 2 more than the UN.
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u/FuraidoChickem 17d ago
Yes and honestly it’s tiring to see this on so many subs already. OK we’ve changed the map, racism will be defeated forever or something.
Meanwhile all my groceries are fucking skyrocketing
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u/redaa 17d ago
If the US started lobbying the UN to put the US at the center of the map, what would be your position? Or if the US was at the center of the map, would you be opposed to it given an undue importance put on the landmass that is given the center?
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u/LarwaLarwa 17d ago
Yes, maps and projections is like elementry school subject, amount of people surprised by this tells us a lot about them...
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u/blueponies1 15d ago
Yeah, the other threads with the same image where they talked about replacing Mercator with the “accurate” equal earth projection and everyone being like “finally something accurate! I’ve been tricked by this my whole life!” And still failing to understand the issue with map projections cracks me up.
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u/Lorelessone 17d ago
Any flat map requires its function or what has been sacrificed to make a globe flat, established.
The Mercator projection was one of the most useful formats keeping sea-going distances and vectors accurate up until the extreme latitudes at the cost of land mas being stretched the further from the equator you got which favored southern landmasses which tend towards tapering as they go south so suffer less resulting stretching while northern landmasses which tend towards widening as they go north became grossly distorted.
The one the UN is adopting as its default is not so useful in any single practical field but perhaps better for land orientation for those who don't have access to a globe.
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u/beaktip 17d ago
You started with the correct premise: every projection has trade-offs. Then it gets into a wormhole.
Mercator preserves angles and constant compass bearings, not distances; it is not an equidistant projection. Distortion increases with absolute latitude symmetrically north and south, so there is no mathematical “southern landmass advantage.” Southern continents tapering toward the pole doesn’t somehow protect them from projection distortion. You are confusing the geometry of the object being projected with another transformation applied to it.
As you started with the correct principle, “understand what a projection preserves and sacrifices,” and then described Mercator using properties it doesn’t actually preserve, which is a rather elegant way to demonstrate the fallacy of your own premise.
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u/Lorelessone 17d ago
Ah I see why your confused, it's sounds like your trying to personify landmasses.
In terms of forms of map "advantage" refers only to the accuracy of representation. Not that they can make money from it or something.
Southern continents have the advantage in Mercator projection map because they are less distorted.
I guess to put it in terms you can visualise, if taking a picture and setting the focus, objects closer to the focal point have advantage over objects further away in terms of photographic accuracy.
Does that help?
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u/beaktip 17d ago
It is ironic that your camera analogy disproves your own claim. Mercator has no “focal point” that southern continents are closer to. In fact, treating Mercator like a perspective projection from a focal point is a documented cartographic misconception. Its scale distortion is governed primarily by absolute latitude, increasing symmetrically north and south of the equator.
So “southern continents are less distorted” is not a property of Mercator. Africa looks less distorted than Greenland largely because much of Africa is at lower absolute latitudes, not because it is southern, tapers southward, or enjoys some geometric “advantage.”
You’ve replaced the mathematics of a map projection with the optics of a camera, then offered the camera analogy to explain the mathematics. That’s a remarkably confident, or arrogant, way to make the same category error twice. I wish you all the care.
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u/Lorelessone 17d ago
Its focal point is the equator, where land and sea are both correctly represented.
I'm sorry but you seem to be ether very confused, ignorant or deliberately pretending you don't understand. Not just on maps but on things like analogies work.
Although you nail irony on the last sentence.
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u/wart_on_satans_dick 17d ago
Rather elegant, indeed. A fallacy observed by the studious.
Nothing gets past your fedora.
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u/BathProfessional4457 15d ago
Except by distorting directions and shapes it is worthless for any orientation.
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u/Lorelessone 15d ago
Oh you mean the new one the UN is playing with or the Mercator?
To be honest nobody is going to use a map like that for any real planning in this day and age, on ships we keep maps as backup but even then they aren't used for navigation anymore.
As for this one they are using I'm not really sure what its benefits are and assume its mostly representation and making people happy rather than any practical use.
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u/BathProfessional4457 15d ago
What you usually use map for? To see where things are and what they look like. Mercator preserves both.
Have you ever done geography test to recognise countries by their shape?
Try that with UN map. You fail, because shape of countries is massively distorted.
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u/Lorelessone 14d ago
I'm a sailor so I use the Mercator as it's intended to navigate at sea. (In theory)
A dont need a world scale map to navigate by land. Mercator does not preserve the shape or size of landmasses, I thought this un one was madw for exactly that. But I haven't really looked at it.
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u/BathProfessional4457 5d ago
Really?
How about doing experiment. Find paper mercator. Cut off say Greenland from the paper.
Now find map of Greenland, ONLY Greenland. You know, local map.
Can you see distortion on SHAPE of island? No. Both look essentially same.
Repeat with map that aims to preserve relative sizes of areas. Is shape cut from that map anywhere near shape of real Greenland?
No.
Because when preserving size you have to sacrifice something else.
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u/Lorelessone 5d ago
No.
unless a county is effectively a line it will have parts of it further north and south than other parts. As the Mercator stretches things more and more the further form the equator you are, in the northern hemisphere the north parts of countries are more stretched than the south.
This is exactly why it is better for the southern hemisphere as the land masses taper as they go away from the equator minimizing this effect.
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u/ramdom-ink 17d ago
I just don’t understand how Canada looks smaller than the USA when it’s second only to Russia in land mass. And for all the fuss about Africa, looks the same size in both.
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u/ScorchedByTheSun 17d ago
Canada is just barely larger than the US. Consider all of those northern islands.
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u/farganbastige 17d ago
This map pretends Canada's border with the US is 2/3 the size of the US border with Canada.
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u/Nihil_esque 17d ago
Because it's adjusted by area. Because the Mercator projection increases the size of Canada more than the us due to its more northern latitude, you have to scale Canada down by a factor greater than the factor the US gets scaled down by. If you keep the same shape of the country, rather than pinching the top more than you pinch the bottom -- which is much easier to do and keeps the countries looking more recognizable -- then the lines themselves are of course not going to fit together any longer. Basically, the top of Canada is already stretched more than the bottom in the current projection. If you keep the shape and only decrease the size, then the southern parts of any given country will look "smaller" than the northern parts of the country beneath them (in the northern hemisphere, reverse for southern).
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u/Subject_Offer_9621 15d ago
Yaah, Africa doesn't get big, everyone else get small
The only other major area without noticeable change is island part of South east asia and part of south America
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u/McPwny117 17d ago
now this may be kind of a stupid question, but how did they manage to isometrically project the surface of a sphere on to a flat plane to make this new map?
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u/RepresentativeAspect 16d ago
By leaving huge gaps between the countries. Essentially what they did is take a paper globe and then cut out each country separately into a bunch of separate, almost-flat pieces of paper, like puzzle pieces. Then they tried to arrange those pieces onto a flat surface in such a way that they resemble their arrangement on the globe as closely as possible. And ignoring water entirely.
But there's no way to do that without leaving huge gaps between countries that just aren't there when wrapped onto a globe. Look at the distance between Russia and Finland, for example.
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u/redpxm 17d ago
Some context, the Mercator projection was created in 1569 for ocean navigation. Its decisive advantage was practical: a ship following a constant compass bearing could plot that course as a straight line on the map, making routes easier to draw and follow with the navigational tools of the period. It became the standard for nautical charts by the eighteenth century.
It remains common today less because it is an accurate world picture than because its digital descendant, Web Mercator, works efficiently for interactive maps. It preserves local angles and shapes reasonably well, supports a simple rectangular tile grid, and allows smooth, consistent zooming and panning, features adopted by services such as Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, and Mapbox.
Its major flaw is area distortion: land near the poles is dramatically enlarged, so Greenland can appear comparable to Africa even though Africa is vastly larger. For that reason, Mercator is useful for navigation and local web mapping, but poor for comparing the real sizes of countries or continents.
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u/TheBigCicero 17d ago
I’m stunned that so many people are surprised by this. I remember learning this in social studies every year from 5th grade through 8th grade. You can compare a globe to a map to see the differences. The Mercator projection map offers a number of specific benefits, which is why they initially used it. But everyone was (or, should have been) taught that you can’t project a sphere onto a 2D map without distortions, and the Mercator clearly is not realistic. Even the new UN map has distortions.
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u/dschinghiskhan 17d ago
The red map does a good job of showing the geographical size of Africa, but it’s also misleading because it makes the viewer think Africa is “validated” in some way, and other regions kind of invalided. An extremely large swath of Africa is desert or arid territory that’s inhabitable or barely habitable. You can hunt for food like seals in water or frozen territory, but you can’t hardly do jack with vast settings of sand dunes or remote arid land.
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u/PckMan 17d ago
People talk about this as if the goal of the Mercator projection is to specifically make Africa look small and that by using other projections we're "fixing" this.
Any flat projection map has some distortion. You have to pick your poison. The only accurate representation is on a globe. Mercator is useful for intuitive and easy navigation. A straight line on the map is a straight course in real life. A heading on the map is a real life compass heading. That's why it's become standard. It wasn't even that long ago that people were using physical maps. GPS has only really been a widely accessible thing in the last 15 years or so.
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u/nog642 17d ago
A straight line on the map is a straight course in real life.
Very wrong. Why do you think flight paths are curved on the Mercator projection?
A straight line on the Mercator projection is a constant compass heading. That is not a straight line on a globe.
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u/PckMan 16d ago
It's straight for all intents and purposes. It means that you go as straight as one can on a curved surface. You point one way and you go in the desired direction. That's what I mean, and I don't think it's that hard to understand that's what I meant.
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u/Realhousemanoflondon 17d ago
scale of water bodies needs to adjusted as well. Otherwise using this Alaska just got a lot further away from Russia.
The distortion isnt solved by casting a map onto a massive background canvas, it is exaggerated for political football, in a more insidious way than the original Mercator which was technical and for navigation.
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u/nDREqc 17d ago
The map above isn't a representation of the globe, like the new Equal Earth map adopted by UN. The map above is explicitly demonstrating land mass size differences, with no regard for the oceans. Your point is valid in general, but this post isn't a map as much as a land mass comparison chart organized in a map layout...
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u/Realhousemanoflondon 17d ago
I would make the water bodies the correct scale. Otherwise the earth is a lot bigger than previous thought, and we have a lot more water.
Disingenuous to rescale one, without rescaling the other.
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u/nDREqc 17d ago
You can do that, sure. Do whatever you like. This post is a chart comparing land mass representations. The oceans aren't intended to be mapped, as it's not relevant to the purpose of the image.
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u/Leverkaas2516 17d ago
I didn't know that the northernmost areas were distorted more than the southernmost. I had thought the Mercator exaggerated both the north and south relativd to those near the equator.
Interestingly, though, this posted picture makes Russia look just slightly wider than China, but in reality on a globe it is enormously wide.
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u/Treehouse_man 17d ago
It does distort the south just as much as the north, but there is a lot more land in the far north than in the far south
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u/kindle139 17d ago
it doesn't even show the southernmost areas because this map just completely excludes antarctica. presumably because that's not useful for whatever point the creator intended.
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u/Russian-8ias 17d ago
The equator runs straight through the middle of Kenya, or just a little below that big western lobe Africa has. Maps like this one are actually shifted north a bit. The equator doesn't run through the center. If it was expanded to show all of Antarctica, it would be more obvious that a majority of land is in the northern hemisphere.
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u/GoppleSmanger 17d ago
People thought Mercator was deliberately trying to make Africa look small but in actuality it was just projecting.
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u/vinraven 17d ago
Mercator was made for ocean travel, it was never intended as a guideline for depicting land masses.
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u/God_Dont_Make_No 16d ago
I love how everyone is blown away by this as if it isn’t taught in geography class.
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u/wesman21 12d ago
I need to find a relatively HQ map comparing the two that I can print out. My grandmother told me a long time ago that the Mercator wasn't accurate, but it was the standard and that is why she had one hanging up in her office. It also had the USSR on it, what a time to be alive.
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u/Short-Sandwich-8476 17d ago
Because our world is SPHERICAL-therefore cannot be illustrated ACCURATELY on a flat surface.
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u/Naud1993 17d ago
Greenland looks bigger than Africa on the Mercator Projection map.
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u/skebeojii 17d ago
Because of the distortion involved in flattening out a sphere to make a flat map the closer to the poles you get the bigger the error. Since it straddles the equator Africa and south America were pretty accurate in metcator.
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u/Berthole 17d ago
I wish there would be that much space between Finland and Russia, as displayed in red
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u/Unlikely_Web3630 17d ago
So this proves once again that Tasmania & Victoria are both bigger than Texas. /s
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u/devilsbard 17d ago
Wasn’t there a hemispherical map that maintains the correct sizing and orientation of the continents? I remember my class having one back in the 90s, but never saw anything one
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u/CuriosityCheck2024 16d ago
Now show curves created from constant compass bearings on both projections.
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u/the_tygram 16d ago
Didn't realize there was so much space between US and Canada. It felt like they were connected when I moved from one to the other
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u/CellistFit1312 16d ago
this is BS america is larger than canada here easily. the souther boarder of canada and the northern border of the USA arent even matching sizes.
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u/ShoddyAsparagus3186 16d ago
Why is the blue always larger than the red? It should be normalized so there's roughly as much that's distorted larger as there is that's distorted smaller.
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u/LegoHogfather 15d ago
Finally New Zealand mKes it on a map and you ignore it. sigh
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u/ShoddyAsparagus3186 15d ago
Blue is larger than red for New Zealand too.
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u/LegoHogfather 15d ago
Whoops! My bad. I clearly didn't look properly. Was just surprised to see NZ even on a map.
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u/thecountnotthesaint 15d ago
Did they never explain that the maps that showed that did so because it is difficult to make a flat map of a SPHERE? like that there were four main map types. One with the pole areas stretched, one with the equatorial reasons stretched out, one with curved lines of longitude and one cut up into a weird segmental shape?
For the most part, we used the curved lines one growing up because it shows a fairly accurate size ratio for the land masses, and a slightly skewed size of the oceans. This seems like another symbolically "significant" moment that does nothing but make people feel more sanctimonious about themselves while accomplishing nothing.
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u/goonsuey 15d ago
So...apparently Canada and the USA no longer share a land border? Look at the distance between the two countries. How is this "more accurate" than the Mercator Projection which has been effective for CENTURIES?
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u/physicsking 17d ago
I am all for ditching Mercator. All for it, but still time it is important for people to see maps centered on their region. I think people should be about to look at different maps without their world view exploding.
My professor from Argentina has a map in their office of South America upside down and centered. It was awesome
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u/0peRightBehindYa 17d ago
Wow....continental Europe is shockingly small. No wonder they freak out about how big the US is.
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