Geography was one of my favourite subjects in high school, and I just can’t believe the map of the world I grew up knowing was one big lie.
For over 500 years, the Mercator projection has been one of the most popular maps of the world, common in atlases and pinned on school walls. If you’ve seen a world map before, it’s very likely a Mercator version.
Devised by Gerardus Mercator in 1569, this distorted map exaggerates the size of the whole northern hemisphere, and makes North America and Europe bigger than South America and Africa.
About two weeks ago, public schools in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, began phasing in the lesser-known Peters projection, which cuts the US, Britain and the rest of Europe down to size.
Mercator’s distortions affect continents as well as nations. For example, South America is made to look about the same size as Europe, when in fact it is almost twice as large, and Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller. Alaska looks bigger than Mexico and Germany is often right in the middle of the picture, not to the north – because publishers frequently cropped off Antarctica and then re-centered the Mercator map, resulting in the equator appearing two-thirds of the way down the image.
In an age of “fake news” and “alternative facts”, Boston city authorities are confident their new map offers something closer to the geographical truth than that of traditional school maps, and hope it can serve an example to schools across the nation and even the world.
Read the full article at: The Guardian
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