Greenland, which appears as a massive icy landmass in Mercator projection, shrinks way down. Visually speaking, Canada and Russia appear to take up approximately 25% of the Earth’s surface, when in reality they occupy a mere 5%.Īs the animated GIF below-created by Reddit user, neilrkaye – demonstrates, northern nations such as Canada and Russia have been artificially “pumped up” in the minds of many people around the world. Mercator’s map inadvertently also pumps up the sizes of Europe and North America. The vast majority of us aren’t using paper maps to chart our course across the ocean anymore, so critics of the Mercator projection argue that the continued use of this style of map gives users a warped sense of the true size of countries-particularly in the case of the African continent. The new map was well-suited to nautical navigation since every line on the sphere is a constant course, or loxodrome. In 1569, the great cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, created a revolutionary new map based on a cylindrical projection. There are various trade-offs with any map style, and those trade-offs can vary depending on how the map is meant to be used. With any map projection style, the big challenge lies in depicting a spherical object as a 2D graphic.

Maps are hugely important tools in our everyday life, whether it’s guiding our journeys from point A to B, or shaping our big picture perceptions about geopolitics and the environment.įor many people, the Earth as they know it is heavily informed by the Mercator projection-a tool used for nautical navigation that eventually became the world’s most widely recognized map. This Clever Map Shows the True Size of Countries

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