The Correct The Map Project
Saturday, 10 January 2026 11:33![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneMaps are interesting things. But world maps can be difficult and problematic.
The problem is that the Earth is not round. It is oblate, semi-spherical, more like an egg. It doesn't project well onto a flat surface. Most world maps use the Mercator Projection.
And that's a problem. So maps are distorted to make them fit a 2D surface. Various projections have been used, but good OLD Mercator is the one used most commonly And now we get down to the brass tacks. The Mercator Projection is almost FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OLD. And no one has been arsed to update it to something more realistic. It is grossly unrepresentative to some countries and areas because, guess what!, white men rule/ruled the world. For example, Mercator shows Greenland (area=2.1ish million sq kilometers) almost as large as Africa, which is almost 15 times the size of Greenland. Similar distortions appear throughout.
Well, the Equal Earth people have put in a huge amount of work and redrawn the world map for a new projection. And they've produced several new maps that are quite cool. You can get Africa playing a large central role, the Americas more centered forward, the Oceania meridian with Australia centered forward, and Oceania with the South Pole on top! (a personal favorite of mine - who gets to proclaim that North is up?!)
https://correctthemap.org/
https://equal-earth.com/
The maps can be ordered here:
https://longitudemaps.com/pages/equal-earth-tom-patterson
The problem is that the Earth is not round. It is oblate, semi-spherical, more like an egg. It doesn't project well onto a flat surface. Most world maps use the Mercator Projection.
And that's a problem. So maps are distorted to make them fit a 2D surface. Various projections have been used, but good OLD Mercator is the one used most commonly And now we get down to the brass tacks. The Mercator Projection is almost FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OLD. And no one has been arsed to update it to something more realistic. It is grossly unrepresentative to some countries and areas because, guess what!, white men rule/ruled the world. For example, Mercator shows Greenland (area=2.1ish million sq kilometers) almost as large as Africa, which is almost 15 times the size of Greenland. Similar distortions appear throughout.
Well, the Equal Earth people have put in a huge amount of work and redrawn the world map for a new projection. And they've produced several new maps that are quite cool. You can get Africa playing a large central role, the Americas more centered forward, the Oceania meridian with Australia centered forward, and Oceania with the South Pole on top! (a personal favorite of mine - who gets to proclaim that North is up?!)
https://correctthemap.org/
https://equal-earth.com/
The maps can be ordered here:
https://longitudemaps.com/pages/equal-earth-tom-patterson
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