+

Escape from Mercator

Post from Mapzen presents a collection of interactive maps exploring alternative forms of geographic representation (including one which is very reminiscent of a scene from the film Inception) :

Like most web mapping services, our Tangram library draws maps in the “Web Mercator” projection. This projection has its benefits, but it’s certainly quirky. Mercator projections are well-known for their distortion at high latitudes—this is because they place the north and south poles at positive and negative infinity, which means a Mercator map of the whole world would be infinitely tall.

… Though it is ubiquitous online (and historically useful to navigators), Mercator doesn’t get much love from the modern cartographer. And in general, Mercators are unsuited for cases when you want to compare the size or shape of anything that isn’t near the equator. So while Web Mercator is useful, we’ve been using Tangram to explore other options.