New York, USA – The world map that millions are used to seeing in books, schools and on phone screens looks like an accurate picture of the sizes of continents and countries.
But the truth is more complicated; attempting to transform the spherical surface of the Earth
into a flat map necessarily leads to distortions in areas, shapes, or distances.
This issue is related to what is known as the Mercator projection.
It was invented by the Belgian cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.
It was extremely useful for navigation because it preserved directions and angles.
However, it exaggerated the sizes of regions the further one moved from the equator.
Correcting the world map
This is why Greenland appears on traditional maps to be close in size to Africa, even though Africa is more than 14 times larger.
Northern countries and regions also appear much larger than their actual areas.
This does not mean that the map is “wrong” in the simple sense,
but rather that every geographical projection chooses to preserve some characteristics at the expense of others.
Some maps focus on the accuracy of areas, while others preserve shapes, directions, or distances.
As for the talk about the United Nations calling for “correcting the world map,”
it needs a degree of accuracy; there is no single flat map that can be considered the final correction to the world map.
The United Nations also does not impose a uniform geographical projection as the only correct form of the world.
Digital mapping techniques
The importance of this issue lies in the fact that maps do not only convey geographical information,
It can also affect the way people perceive the size and position of countries and continents on Earth.
With the development of digital mapping technologies, it has become possible to display the globe in three dimensions.
This greatly reduces the confusion caused by flat maps, and makes comparing the sizes of continents much more accurate.
The basic rule remains that the Earth is spherical, while the paper is flat;
therefore, any map of the world on a flat surface will necessarily contain some degree of distortion.
The real question is not: Which map is absolutely correct? Rather: What property does the map want to preserve?
