African Union joins calls to end use of Mercator map that shrinks Africa's size

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/15/african-union-true-size-world-map-replace-mercator-version

by Geekette • 11 months ago

29 19 11 months ago

Created by the cartographer Gerardus Mercator for navigation, the projection distorts continent sizes

AIUI the important word here is ‘nagivation’. If you use the other projections for navigation you’re going to have a bad time.

immibis• 11 months ago

It depends. Some distort angles. Others distort distances. Some distort both, but only half as much. You can't have neither.

spwa42• 11 months ago

Well, this one doesn't distort angles, and tries to get the entire world in a paper for practicality. Whilst you can change the parameters, you cannot make anything near the equator big.

Maps like Mercator are the only square maps where if you measure an angle to a destination where you stand and on the map, and then follow the resulting angle in a straight line, you actually get where you're going. This is especially important for ships, as they travel long distances, and the longer the distance, the more wrong other maps will lead you.

But politicians, of course, declare that ego is more important.

I love what most local maps do in atlasses these days. They use local projections, and for anything up to the size of, say, the state of New York (or smaller) that will have very, very close to the properties of a globe. This does of course show that atlasses try to be practical and produce useful maps. Not ego-based maps.

bombcar• 11 months ago

We have a map that works fine, it’s called a globe.

I bet you can even find some that are the correct oblate spheroid.

delichon2• 11 months ago

For a one foot diameter globe, the diameter difference would be about 1mm. You couldn't tell without calipers or such. A typical commercial globe will be more oblate than that unintentionally.

perrygeo• 11 months ago

It's easy to get lost in the geodesy details, which really matter at a local scale! But on a global scale the earth is effectively round.

Many of us have seen images like this: https://www.asu.cas.cz/~bezdek/vyzkum/rotating_3d_globe/figu... which are effective at showing the shape and gravitational anomalies but is wildly exaggerated on the height axis. Visualizing to scale would look indistinguishable from sphere.

Waterluvian3• 11 months ago

It really is kind of unfortunate that the Earth is an oblate spheroid. It complicates a lot of things. I’ve been a fairly vocal proponent of stopping the Earth’s spin to eventually correct for this (we hope).

delichon2• 11 months ago

That would further simplify things by wiping out human life on Earth. Nuclear submariners might last a few years.

pella• 11 months ago

https://equal-earth.com/

  ""
  A world map for everyone
  The Equal Earth Wall Map is for schools, organizations, or anyone who needs a map showing countries and continents at their true sizes relative to each other. Africa appears 14 times larger than Greenland as it actually is. And wherever you live, the map has you covered. Download a choice of three versions centered on these regions: Africa/Europe, the Americas, and East Asia/Australia.
  Other features include:
  •  It’s free. Download the map and print as many copies as you want.
  •  It’s big. The map measures 55” wide x 29” tall (1.4 x 0.74 meters). You can print it even larger thanks to the very high resolution.
  •  Just enough detail.  The 2,600+ map labels provide geographic context without overwhelming you with too much information.
  •  Professional design. With pleasing colors, readable type, and clear visual hierarchies, this is a map that you will want to look at.
  ""

+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection

belZaah• 11 months ago

Lovely, shows Crimea as part of Russia. Despite the UN not recognizing it as such. Can we have a map, that’s not based on opinions, please?

kamma4434• 11 months ago

Technically it does not shrink Africa’s size but it inflates the apparent size of northern and southern areas.

It seems clear that the problems of African developement can be fixed by topping the evil cadre of cartographers that keep it down. On the other hand, Africa has an obvious advantage by coming first in alphabetical order.

Waterluvian3• 11 months ago

Africa has also been in the middle of most world maps for a long time.

We have the technology to fix this: all maps should be dynamic, using a planar projection centred on the viewer’s coordinates. It will embiggen all local geography while omitting distant lands. We’ll call this approach the Egocentric Cartographic Model.

iroddis• 11 months ago

Seems like a perfectly cromulent solution.

dkiebd• 11 months ago

I was thinking precisely that making Africa appear larger would make it even more evident what a waste of space it is. If I were African I’d rather try and go unnoticed.

jjgreen• 11 months ago

The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) supports a lot of projections, their documentation is well worth a browse: https://docs.generic-mapping-tools.org/6.0/cookbook/map_proj...

fanf2• 11 months ago

They will have to come up with a standard replacement for Web Mercator and update lots of GIS software to use the new standard, if they want to make a practical dent in how much Mercator is used.

spwa42• 11 months ago

Mercator maps aren't used because of ego but because they are the ONLY maps that have 2 properties:

1) straight lines in reality are straight lines on the map. Which enables the following: measure an angle on the map and walk in that direction to get to a destination (e.g. compared to THAT mountaintop, go 30degrees to it's right and walk in a straight line, to get to your destination)

In all other map types (including an actual globe I might add), you have to walk a curve. A "geodesic".

2) straight lines in reality are straight lines on the map. So walking a straight line actually gets you where the line on the map is going (meaning you don't need those absurdly huge compasses to construct ellipses to approximate your path on the map that you see in certain old paintings or in some movies)

But of course, the only reason someone might want these properties on maps is ego. That's the only thing.

Centrino• 11 months ago

Can we agree that the 16th-century map of Africa shown with the article, is not in the Mercator projection, as the meridians and parallels are not straight lines? Mercator did use different projections for different maps, depending on their purpose.

African Union joins calls to end use of Mercator map that shrinks Africa's size

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