Pros: Sailors loved it preserves angles and directions in a small areaĬons: Bad for understanding the real size and shape of continents and countries And yet, Google Maps, Bing, Yahoo and even OpenStreetMaps continue using some version or the other of the Mercator to display the world. The map also suggests that Scandinavian countries are larger than India, whereas, India is actually three times the size. In reality, Africa is almost 14 times larger, and Greenland can fit inside China no less than four times. On a Mercator projection, Greenland is roughly the same size as Africa. However, Mercator is one of those rare maps whose answer to latitudinal distortion was to ensure that the longitudinal distortion is equally bad! In most maps, when you try to fix one kind of distortion, you increase another kind of distortion. Mercator was designed as a navigational tool for sailors as it was most convenient to hand-plot courses with parallel rules and triangles on this map. It was created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 – a time when Antarctica hadn’t even been discovered. The most popular map projection in the world has been around for 448 years now. However, which map projection should be used for general purposes, such as, for hanging in classrooms or on TV news? Here’s how some popular projections weigh against each other: Mercator Likewise, when cartographers try to flatten the Earth for a map projection, distortions in terms of shape, distance, direction, or land area are inevitable to creep in.ĭepending on the purpose they are trying to serve, the number of possible map projections is limitless. Try as you might, you just cannot flatten an orange peel without tearing, squashing or stretching it. The ‘orange peel problem’ is perhaps the most widely-cited analogy that geographers use to explain why a three-dimensional world cannot be represented in two dimensions sans any kind of distortion.
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