#mercator map

Equal Earth Map !

In the Equal Earth map projection, continents appear to more closely match their real relative sizes. Unlike the Mercator map, in which latitude and longitude lines meet at 90-degree angles, its lines are curved to reflect the earth’s spherical shape, leading to a more accurate portrayal of the African continent’s scale.

Some technology companies allow users to switch between map projections, but the Mercator remains the default on many services.

The Correct the Map campaign launched a petition calling for the United Nations and the British Broadcasting Company (BCC) to adopt the Equal Earth map, encouraging other organizations to follow suit. The petition had garnered nearly 7,000 signatures as of the time of publication.

“This distortion isn’t just a cartographic error — it’s a narrative failure,” Correct the Map’s petition text reads. “In a world where size is often equated with power, misrepresenting Africa’s true scale reinforces harmful misconceptions about its geopolitical and economic significance.”

Hi Internet friends! Here’s a cool little puzzle that will show you how many of the maps you’ve been looking at your whole life have been lying to you!

Basically it’s a map that shows some countries (big blobs in red) as they would be in their real size, as determined by the Peter’s map, but moved to other locations. Your job is to move those blobs back to their place on the Mercator map (which is the regular map most people work with.) It’s still in its pretty early stages, so there’s only 15 countries, but it was a lot of fun to do anyways.

When he first published his world map in 1569, it revolutionized navigation. For the first time, sailors could plot a route between any two destinations in the world using a straight line, and then follow that route without having to adjust their compasses.

To project the globe onto a flat surface, Mercator straightened the vertical lines of longitude into parallel lines, and he added space between the horizontal lines of latitude. This distorted the distance at the North and South poles, which is why Greenland and Antarctica appear so large on flat world maps. The Mercator projection soon became the authoritative world map. Mercator was also the first person to use the word "atlas" to refer to a book of maps.