Another view ...
... The UN has just called for the predominant world map to be replaced with one that more accurately reflects the true size of continents such as Africa.
The "Correct the Map" resolution adopted by the General Assembly aims to fix the discrepancy on the Mercator map, in which the African continent is shown as being of similar size to Greenland -- even though it is in reality about 14 times larger. ...
The now widely used Mercator map was created in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator.
Its main purpose was to help European sailors navigate the oceans, as cartography Professor James Cheshire at University College London explained.
"He wanted a straight line to be drawn on a map to look like a straight line in reality if you followed a compass bearing," he told the BBC. "That was what it was intended to do, and that's what it does brilliantly well."
To keep those angles correct on a flat map, Mercator had to stretch the grid lines wider as they moved away from the equator toward the poles.
His map accommodates for the curvature of the Earth by making countries near the equator seem much smaller than they are, with countries nearer the poles appearing stretched. ...
The Equal Earth map aims to address this problem with the Mercator projection.
It was developed by a team of cartographers in 2018 to present the size and shape of landmasses more accurately. It was inspired by the 1963 Robinson projection -- a map that shows the entire globe's surface at once.
The Equal Earth map was adopted by African Union members in February.
But it sacrifices the straight lines that made the Mercator projection perfect for navigating with -- and it cannot be used for measuring the true distance between different places.
"You can preserve area, or you can preserve shape, or you can preserve distance and direction, but not everything at once perfectly, because otherwise you'd be back to a sphere," Cheshire said. ...
