Why every world map is wrong Kayla Wolf
Fourteen Greenlands could fit in Africa,
but you wouldn’t guess it
from most maps of the world.
The fact is, every world map humans
have ever made is wrong.
Actually, it’s impossible to make a map
of the world 100% right.
No, not you, globe—
we know you’re accurate.
Not you, Google Earth,
you’re just a digital globe.
We’re talking about flat maps, which,
let’s face it,
are way more convenient
for a lot of things.
Anyway, as we were saying,
it’s impossible to make a 100% accurate
flat map of a spherical planet.
For a long time, people didn’t even try.
They just plonked places down in arbitrary
locations without any consistent scale.
Then in 150 AD, the Greek mathematician
and astronomer Ptolemy
systematically mapped the Earth on a grid
and placed locations on the grid
according to coordinates,
so maps could be checked against
others and replicated.
Ptolemy built his grid out of lines
we still use today:
180 lines of latitude
and 360 lines of longitude.
In spite of these advances,
people kept getting lost.
Part of the problem was a— shall we say—
incomplete understanding
of the world’s geography.
But it was also just really difficult
to navigate using a map.
Because the Earth is round,
the shortest route from one place
to another is a path along a circle.
If we draw this route on a flat map,
it passes through every line of longitude
at a different angle.
To follow the route,
you’d have to constantly shift
the direction you’re traveling.
Any slight error would land
you in the wrong place.
In 1569, Gerardus Mercator
fixed this problem.
He created a world map proportioned
so these curved navigational routes
would be straight,
passing through every line
of longitude at the same angle
and therefore allowing navigators
to set a constant bearing—
in other words, travel in one direction—
for a whole journey.
There was just one tiny hitch:
to do this, he had to distort land masses
and bodies of water
so those furthest
from the equator got larger
and those closest
to the equator shrank.
In spite of its inaccuracies, Mercator’s
map was very useful.
In fact, it’s still widely used today,
including in online maps.
But it’s still wrong!
In 1925, the Goode Homolosine Projection
was created as— get this—
an interrupted pseudo-cylindrical
equal area projection.
What does that mean?
Not important.
The point was to minimize
distortion for the entire world.
The map can be land-oriented…
or ocean-oriented.
Either way, the so-called orange peel map
isn’t very easy to read.
The Dymaxion Projection by American
architect Buckminster Fuller
in the 1940s is even better.
Sorry,
did we say better?
It’s not better if you want to understand
where things are in the world.
It is better in the sense that there are
no visibly evident distortions
of the land masses.
Though if you wanted to know, say,
how far Brazil is from Nigeria,
you won’t get any sense
of that from this map.
The most accurate projection to date
is the AuthaGraph World Map
designed by Japanese architect
Hajime Narukawa in 1999.
The continents and oceans are almost
completely in proportion,
and the map is rectangular,
just how we like it.
Could this be the perfect map?
Well… no.
Since the Mercator works
for navigation and reads clearly,
why bother with all these
whacky maps?
Arno Peters argued that by enlarging
European and North American countries,
the Mercator projection
gives white nations a sense of supremacy
over non-white nations
closer to the equator.
He adapted the Gall-Peters Projection,
which counteracts that particular problem,
but the continents are still… stretched.
Today, we rely on maps less and less
for navigation,
but they still play a vital role
in education.
Peters was definitely on to something:
no matter what map we’re looking at,
it’s a story told from the perspective
of the map’s creator
that in turn shapes—perhaps unduly—
our perception of our world.
Simple changes in map design,
even changes that have nothing
to do with how we transfer
a round Earth to a flat surface,
can completely shift our point of view.