I have always found it a bizarre idea that we allegedly judge a country's importance by it's size on a Mercator projection map. Does anyone really think Greenland is the most important place in the world? Europe is tiny, yet the kind of people to complain about it will also complain about the outsized importance of it. Africa, which is apparently a victim of such projectionism, is also placed in the middle because of where the arbitrary Greenwich meridian goes.
Also notable that in the centuries following Mercator projection, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the northern parts of South America actually shrunk by the map were regarded as vast, unexplored wildernesses full of resources to plunder (and the northern realms expanded by the projection as inaccessible icy wasteland). Difficult to imagine the Gall-Peters projection making conquistadors and colonists from little European countries more respectful of the inhabitants of the equatorial realms, though I guess they might have got lost more using it...
Ironically it's by looking at a globe rather than even a map like this that Greenlands worth becomes more visible. We need to centre the globe on Greenland and see what it tells us.
Greenland has at least two reasons to be worth more then it is now: in the future when the north polar ice sheet melts. The arctic circle becomes a navigable ocean. It's a short way from USA and Europe to Asia (or Russia).
Secondly removing the ice means it's much easier to get the essential hydrocarbons underneath of which there are lots of and which many countries will want.
So the reasons for Greenland is geography, security, control, trade and economy. And by thinking long term. It can also explain some off handed and mocked comments about Canada too.
In my childhood I definitely thought Greenland was a much physically large place than it is, because of the mercator world map the hung on the wall in home room. Was dumbfounded when I learned it actually fits within the continental US.
Agreed - territorial area is only one measure of importance, and probably not a great one. What would be more useful on a wall, if we are interested in such things, are bubbles with size showing population, GDP, life expectancy, etc. (a la https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles&url=v2 ), arranged to preserve, as much as possible, country positions on the projection of your choosing.
I don't think enough people talk about how lucky we are that the International Date Line can roughly follow a line of longitude 180 degrees from the Greenwich meridian. If you were on a planet with more land, or we could only draw it through the Atlantic or Australia, timezones would be a lot weirder.
> Does anyone really think Greenland is the most important place in the world?
Well, no-one sensible. However.
"I love maps. And I always said: 'Look at the size of this. It's massive. That should be part of the United States.'"
That’s noted very stable genius Donald Trump, there, on the enormity of Greenland, and why it would therefore be something which it is sensible to somehow try to buy.
> I have always found it a bizarre idea that we allegedly judge a country's importance by it's size on a Mercator projection map
I don’t think anyone thinks this, because it is bizarre. It’s just that at some point we stigmatized calling out stupid ideas as long as someone is purporting to speak on behalf of non-Europeans.
Doesn't bringing up the topic of different projections still act as a good reminder that maps of spherical planets will always have one issue or another?
Graphical representations of things have an impact on preception and then by proxy on thinking. Maintaining aome degree of general awareness of these impacts leads to better thinking that is more reflective of the ground truth.
Some would call that "woke" with bad intentions, but hey, they got an agenda and that agaenda doesn't care about facts.
Is it popular though? When I studied Geography at school, we had a standard school atlas that was used by a huge number of schools throughout the country and across several generations. It had maps on essentially every page - of course. Only one was Mercator: showing time zones. That's it.
> ask yourself why the mercator projection was so popular for so long
Besause maps was developed as tools for navigation.
But if you want an idea of the relative sizes and positions of the countries of the world, you should use a globe.
Regarding colonization, I’d note that Greenland, Canada and Siberia wasn’t the greatest colonizers. The conspiracy theory about Marcator justifying colonization does not really make sense. Norway, Iceland and Greenland gets a much bigger size boost than Spain, France and UK. But Greenland was colonized, not a colonizer.
> Besause maps was developed as tools for navigation.
It's not perfect for navigation either, especially over long distance if you want to navigate from Europe to the US, going in straight line over a Mercator projection is going to make your trip much longer than it ought to be. So while it makes sense for smaller-scale maps because the angles are preserved, it's totally pointless for a world map.
> However, ask yourself why the mercator projection was so popular for so long, and why resistance to other projections took so long to counter.
Wasn't that primarily because of sea trade and the mercator projection being very useful for that because you can draw a straight line on it and then set a straight course?
As I said in another comment[1] this is only true at small scale. As soon as you start crossing oceans, you absolutely do not want to navigate in straight line as it's going to inflate your travel by a significant amount of distance.
As such, while the Mercator projection makes total sense for a map of northern Europe or the Caribbean, it makes absolutely no sense as a map of the entire world.
But globes aren't really that practical for navigation. You can plan your voyage, but when you're at sea, how do you make sure you're going in the right direction? Mercator has the advantage that you can use your compass and as long as you stay on course, you'll arrive at your destination.
Keep in mind: that's 500 years ago, not 50 years ago. There's no question that we have better tools today but the question was why the mercator projection was so successful it became the default. I think "it was super useful at the time because it made navigation easy, reliable, and available to everyone, at any any weather" is a much more compelling explanation than "the would-be colonizers spread it because their home-countries were enlarged and they liked that and used it to oppress the equatorial countries".
> But globes aren't really that practical for navigation. You can plan your voyage, but when you're at sea, how do you make sure you're going in the right direction?
With a compass, a sextant, a clock, and geometric calculations to get the intermediate points you'll then use a straight course to rally these point. The Mercator projection just inverse the order of the calculations (going from the intermediate points to course is straightforward as you just go in straight line over the Mercator projection), but deriving the said points requires calculations. If you have a globe, it's the other way around.
> is a much more compelling explanation than "the would-be colonizers spread it because their home-countries were enlarged and they liked that and used it to oppress the equatorial countries".
This is a strawman though, nobody serious would claim it has been designed for that reason. The fact is that it distorted the view of peoples in a way that aligned situ colonists propaganda at home. But those claims aren't at all equivalent.
If you want kids to understand what the world looks like, put a physical globe in every elementary classroom. This will give them a starting point from which to understand how different flat projections work.
(For further exploration of the ideals of maps, James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State is excellent treatise for pulling the boundaries of the question back.)
The choices of cities, towns, and lakes to display in New Zealand is rather strange. The biggest lakes in the South Island are missing, and Napier, Rotorua, and Nelson are shown while some bigger places aren't.
Small quibble: the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey all have "(UK)" appended. They are not actually part of the UK, but British Crown dependencies. Possible confusion (as with most things British and overseas).
The " (UK)" appendix roughly indicates who would come to protect them in case somebody else tried to invade.
The channel island Jersey, for instance, more correctly "The Bailiwick of Jersey", is an autonomous and self-governing island territory of the British Islands. It is a British Crown Dependency with an independent local gouvernment, but not a sovereign state.
There is literally a huge and prominent link entitled "Equal Earth Projection" in the middle, at the top, that when clicked take you to a description of what the intent of the projection was:
It was created to provide a visually pleasing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which some schools and socially concerned groups have adopted out of concern for fairness. Their priority is to show developing countries in the tropics and developed countries in the north with correctly proportioned sizes.
In addition to being rigorously equal-area throughout, other Equal Earth projection features include:
• An overall shape similar to that of the Robinson projection. (The Robinson, although popular and pleasing to the eye, is not equal-area as is the Equal Earth projection).
• The curved sides of the projection suggest the spherical form of Earth.
• Straight parallels that make it easier to compare how far north or south places are from the equator.
> • The curved sides of the projection suggest the spherical form of Earth.
> • Straight parallels that make it easier to compare how far north or south places are from the equator.
Okay, we've now added a constraint that this should be pseudocylindrical [0].
So why pick this over, say, Eckert IV or something from the Tobler Hyperelliptical family?
There is perhaps an additional argument (present on the wiki page [1], and elaborated on the paper introducing the projection [2]) that the equal earth projection is computationally easier to translate between lat/long and map coordinates, as it explicitly uses a polynomial equation instead of strict elliptical arcs. (This is the main argument presented against Eckert IV.)
The paper also lists some additional aesthetic goals: poles do not converge to points (ruling out Tobler Hyperelliptical), and meridians do not bulge excessively.
In fact, the paper describes Equal Area to be a blend of Craster parabolic and Eckert IV (then aesthetically tuned to avoid being stretched too much in either direction). It is also notable that the Equal Area paper measures both lower scale distortion and angular deformation for Eckert IV.
Yes, and there are also already multiple equal-area projections with similar properties, too. For example, the Goode homolosine "orange-peel" projection only loses out by failing to show contiguous oceans (emphasizing land masses instead) and having a discontinuity where two simpler projections are joined. It gives equal-area projection and improved shapes (as compared to fully homolographic projections) while still showing "curved sides [that] suggest the spherical form of Earth" (arguably, far more so). Its parallels are straight, and furthermore they are equidistant in the central latitudes (in which it's based on a sinusoidal projection).
Oh, and it was developed over a century ago, and already in common use when Arno Peters started his activism for the Gall-Peters projection (called this even though Peters made no refinements in independently developing a projection identical to Gall's 1855 work, and even initially mis-described it).
I see the page about "Data Sources", but would be interested in more info about how it was made. Do people use "auto-layout" algorithms for placement of labels? Or maybe it is just started with something basic and have to do lots of refinements by-hand?
Living in the northern hemisphere, it bugs me that standard north-up, west-left maps don't match up with the sun and with our clocks. It's neat that both clock hands and the sun are "up" at noon. It would be even neater if that upward direction corresponded to south, since that's where the sun actually is at midday. With south-at-top, east-to-the-left, maps would sync with both our clocks and the sun's daily arc. But then we would lose the west-left rhyme.
As a European the "Oceania - South at Top" looks like some other planet. I like this very much - that there are ways of looking at something so singular and familiar, our shared planet, that make it look new and unfamiliar.
Why did you include OpenStreetMap in your list? OpenStreetMap already allows for disputed borders (and there are a lot of those). If you look at the border of Russia, you'll note that Crimea is included:
This is pretty much the current state of affairs as far as surveyable boundaries go. Russia has a de facto claim on Crimea by brute presence, Ukraine by international recognition. When that changes, OpenStreetMap will reflect the new boundaries correctly.
Donbas and Luhansk are contested, obviously, but also lack a clearly defined border for Russia's claim, unlike Crimea. It is an active theatre of war, so any mapping of boundaries outside of Ukraine's original borders is out of scope for OpenStreetMap.
I have always found it a bizarre idea that we allegedly judge a country's importance by it's size on a Mercator projection map. Does anyone really think Greenland is the most important place in the world? Europe is tiny, yet the kind of people to complain about it will also complain about the outsized importance of it. Africa, which is apparently a victim of such projectionism, is also placed in the middle because of where the arbitrary Greenwich meridian goes.
Also notable that in the centuries following Mercator projection, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the northern parts of South America actually shrunk by the map were regarded as vast, unexplored wildernesses full of resources to plunder (and the northern realms expanded by the projection as inaccessible icy wasteland). Difficult to imagine the Gall-Peters projection making conquistadors and colonists from little European countries more respectful of the inhabitants of the equatorial realms, though I guess they might have got lost more using it...
Ironically it's by looking at a globe rather than even a map like this that Greenlands worth becomes more visible. We need to centre the globe on Greenland and see what it tells us.
Greenland has at least two reasons to be worth more then it is now: in the future when the north polar ice sheet melts. The arctic circle becomes a navigable ocean. It's a short way from USA and Europe to Asia (or Russia).
Secondly removing the ice means it's much easier to get the essential hydrocarbons underneath of which there are lots of and which many countries will want.
So the reasons for Greenland is geography, security, control, trade and economy. And by thinking long term. It can also explain some off handed and mocked comments about Canada too.
In my childhood I definitely thought Greenland was a much physically large place than it is, because of the mercator world map the hung on the wall in home room. Was dumbfounded when I learned it actually fits within the continental US.
Agreed - territorial area is only one measure of importance, and probably not a great one. What would be more useful on a wall, if we are interested in such things, are bubbles with size showing population, GDP, life expectancy, etc. (a la https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles&url=v2 ), arranged to preserve, as much as possible, country positions on the projection of your choosing.
The Greenwich meridian is not actually 100% arbitrary. It is a convenient location that does not split into two any significant landmasses.
I don't think enough people talk about how lucky we are that the International Date Line can roughly follow a line of longitude 180 degrees from the Greenwich meridian. If you were on a planet with more land, or we could only draw it through the Atlantic or Australia, timezones would be a lot weirder.
It does split off part of Russia, I believe. The Florence meridian works slightly better for avoiding splitting any landmasses.
As I understand it, it's not the best location, it's just good enough and was very popular for historical reasons.
It's mostly a convenient location for a group based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich to define...
> Does anyone really think Greenland is the most important place in the world?
Well, no-one sensible. However.
"I love maps. And I always said: 'Look at the size of this. It's massive. That should be part of the United States.'"
That’s noted very stable genius Donald Trump, there, on the enormity of Greenland, and why it would therefore be something which it is sensible to somehow try to buy.
> I have always found it a bizarre idea that we allegedly judge a country's importance by it's size on a Mercator projection map
I don’t think anyone thinks this, because it is bizarre. It’s just that at some point we stigmatized calling out stupid ideas as long as someone is purporting to speak on behalf of non-Europeans.
Doesn't bringing up the topic of different projections still act as a good reminder that maps of spherical planets will always have one issue or another?
Graphical representations of things have an impact on preception and then by proxy on thinking. Maintaining aome degree of general awareness of these impacts leads to better thinking that is more reflective of the ground truth.
Some would call that "woke" with bad intentions, but hey, they got an agenda and that agaenda doesn't care about facts.
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Is it popular though? When I studied Geography at school, we had a standard school atlas that was used by a huge number of schools throughout the country and across several generations. It had maps on essentially every page - of course. Only one was Mercator: showing time zones. That's it.
Growing up, I did not see Mercator at all often.
> ask yourself why the mercator projection was so popular for so long
Besause maps was developed as tools for navigation.
But if you want an idea of the relative sizes and positions of the countries of the world, you should use a globe.
Regarding colonization, I’d note that Greenland, Canada and Siberia wasn’t the greatest colonizers. The conspiracy theory about Marcator justifying colonization does not really make sense. Norway, Iceland and Greenland gets a much bigger size boost than Spain, France and UK. But Greenland was colonized, not a colonizer.
> Besause maps was developed as tools for navigation.
It's not perfect for navigation either, especially over long distance if you want to navigate from Europe to the US, going in straight line over a Mercator projection is going to make your trip much longer than it ought to be. So while it makes sense for smaller-scale maps because the angles are preserved, it's totally pointless for a world map.
As an example compare this to the straigh line between Edinburgh and Miami in mercator projection: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=edinburgh+miami
> However, ask yourself why the mercator projection was so popular for so long, and why resistance to other projections took so long to counter.
Wasn't that primarily because of sea trade and the mercator projection being very useful for that because you can draw a straight line on it and then set a straight course?
As I said in another comment[1] this is only true at small scale. As soon as you start crossing oceans, you absolutely do not want to navigate in straight line as it's going to inflate your travel by a significant amount of distance.
As such, while the Mercator projection makes total sense for a map of northern Europe or the Caribbean, it makes absolutely no sense as a map of the entire world.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45002873
Did they have better map projections for cross-oceanic navigation 500 years ago when the mercator projection was invented?
AFAIK you'd need a projection for each origin/destination pair, so it's not exactly convenient. A globe is by far the best tool for such a job.
But globes aren't really that practical for navigation. You can plan your voyage, but when you're at sea, how do you make sure you're going in the right direction? Mercator has the advantage that you can use your compass and as long as you stay on course, you'll arrive at your destination.
Keep in mind: that's 500 years ago, not 50 years ago. There's no question that we have better tools today but the question was why the mercator projection was so successful it became the default. I think "it was super useful at the time because it made navigation easy, reliable, and available to everyone, at any any weather" is a much more compelling explanation than "the would-be colonizers spread it because their home-countries were enlarged and they liked that and used it to oppress the equatorial countries".
> But globes aren't really that practical for navigation. You can plan your voyage, but when you're at sea, how do you make sure you're going in the right direction?
With a compass, a sextant, a clock, and geometric calculations to get the intermediate points you'll then use a straight course to rally these point. The Mercator projection just inverse the order of the calculations (going from the intermediate points to course is straightforward as you just go in straight line over the Mercator projection), but deriving the said points requires calculations. If you have a globe, it's the other way around.
> is a much more compelling explanation than "the would-be colonizers spread it because their home-countries were enlarged and they liked that and used it to oppress the equatorial countries".
This is a strawman though, nobody serious would claim it has been designed for that reason. The fact is that it distorted the view of peoples in a way that aligned situ colonists propaganda at home. But those claims aren't at all equivalent.
If you want kids to understand what the world looks like, put a physical globe in every elementary classroom. This will give them a starting point from which to understand how different flat projections work.
IIRC my daughter used to have an inflatable plastic ball with a Earth political map on it, it's cheap enough to give each kid their own globe.
I went to school in virginia and we had globes. Did you guys not have globes in other states?
This.
Bonus, it helps make clear what is wrong with many flat-earthers assertions.
While we’re discussing map projections - Tupaia’s map of the south seas deserves mention as a reminder that every map has a baked in set of assumptions and use cases: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/society/2021/re...
(For further exploration of the ideals of maps, James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State is excellent treatise for pulling the boundaries of the question back.)
The choices of cities, towns, and lakes to display in New Zealand is rather strange. The biggest lakes in the South Island are missing, and Napier, Rotorua, and Nelson are shown while some bigger places aren't.
Is it similar for other countries?
Small quibble: the Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey all have "(UK)" appended. They are not actually part of the UK, but British Crown dependencies. Possible confusion (as with most things British and overseas).
I think you may have misunderstood the meaning of the brackets. The key says this means “dependency or area of special sovereignty”.
You're correct. I didn't spot the legend.
The " (UK)" appendix roughly indicates who would come to protect them in case somebody else tried to invade.
The channel island Jersey, for instance, more correctly "The Bailiwick of Jersey", is an autonomous and self-governing island territory of the British Islands. It is a British Crown Dependency with an independent local gouvernment, but not a sovereign state.
The name of the island I live on (Amami) is misspelled. That does not give me a great deal of confidence about the rest of the map.
I see Amami, what is the error?
On the detailed map showing Taiwan etc, the text on my image is clearly "Amani". I think that's true on the "big map" also.
On the Greenwich-centered maps, it shows Amami in both the English[1] en the French[2] version at least.
[1]: https://www.equal-earth.com/Equal-Earth-Map-0.jpg [2]: https://www.equal-earth.com/Equal-Earth-Map-0-FR.jpg
Where did you find the detailed maps?
Mandatory XKCD: "What your map projection says about you".[1]
[1] https://xkcd.com/977/
mandatory Gall–Peters clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY
Mobile version
https://m.xkcd.com/977/
Numerous equal-area projections already exist. It's unclear what makes this one better.
There is literally a huge and prominent link entitled "Equal Earth Projection" in the middle, at the top, that when clicked take you to a description of what the intent of the projection was:
Perhaps that makes it clearer for you.So why pick this over, say, Eckert IV or something from the Tobler Hyperelliptical family?
There is perhaps an additional argument (present on the wiki page [1], and elaborated on the paper introducing the projection [2]) that the equal earth projection is computationally easier to translate between lat/long and map coordinates, as it explicitly uses a polynomial equation instead of strict elliptical arcs. (This is the main argument presented against Eckert IV.)
The paper also lists some additional aesthetic goals: poles do not converge to points (ruling out Tobler Hyperelliptical), and meridians do not bulge excessively.
In fact, the paper describes Equal Area to be a blend of Craster parabolic and Eckert IV (then aesthetically tuned to avoid being stretched too much in either direction). It is also notable that the Equal Area paper measures both lower scale distortion and angular deformation for Eckert IV.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections#pseudo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=doi.org%2F10.1080%2F136...
edit: I found https://map-projections.net/singleview.php which you can view a bunch of other possible candidates by selecting Pseudocylindric + Equal-Area.
Yes, and there are also already multiple equal-area projections with similar properties, too. For example, the Goode homolosine "orange-peel" projection only loses out by failing to show contiguous oceans (emphasizing land masses instead) and having a discontinuity where two simpler projections are joined. It gives equal-area projection and improved shapes (as compared to fully homolographic projections) while still showing "curved sides [that] suggest the spherical form of Earth" (arguably, far more so). Its parallels are straight, and furthermore they are equidistant in the central latitudes (in which it's based on a sinusoidal projection).
Oh, and it was developed over a century ago, and already in common use when Arno Peters started his activism for the Gall-Peters projection (called this even though Peters made no refinements in independently developing a projection identical to Gall's 1855 work, and even initially mis-described it).
I read that and it's still not clear because there are already projections that meet those criteria.
Usually it all boils down to "aesthetics". I am pretty sure most would agree that Gall-Peters is atrocious looking!
I see the page about "Data Sources", but would be interested in more info about how it was made. Do people use "auto-layout" algorithms for placement of labels? Or maybe it is just started with something basic and have to do lots of refinements by-hand?
It's not the size of the landmass that counts, anyway. It's how you use it.
There's a great online tool to compare the actual sizes of countries https://www.thetruesize.com
"Gulf of Mexico" is correctly labeled!
I love the "south at the top" variants! :D
Living in the northern hemisphere, it bugs me that standard north-up, west-left maps don't match up with the sun and with our clocks. It's neat that both clock hands and the sun are "up" at noon. It would be even neater if that upward direction corresponded to south, since that's where the sun actually is at midday. With south-at-top, east-to-the-left, maps would sync with both our clocks and the sun's daily arc. But then we would lose the west-left rhyme.
As a European the "Oceania - South at Top" looks like some other planet. I like this very much - that there are ways of looking at something so singular and familiar, our shared planet, that make it look new and unfamiliar.
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Why did you include OpenStreetMap in your list? OpenStreetMap already allows for disputed borders (and there are a lot of those). If you look at the border of Russia, you'll note that Crimea is included:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/60189
And the border of Ukraine includes Crimea too:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/60199
This is pretty much the current state of affairs as far as surveyable boundaries go. Russia has a de facto claim on Crimea by brute presence, Ukraine by international recognition. When that changes, OpenStreetMap will reflect the new boundaries correctly.
Donbas and Luhansk are contested, obviously, but also lack a clearly defined border for Russia's claim, unlike Crimea. It is an active theatre of war, so any mapping of boundaries outside of Ukraine's original borders is out of scope for OpenStreetMap.
As a practical matter, the border would need to stop moving and become safe enough for surveyors to traverse in some way.