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World of Maps

WORLD OF MÁPS Did you know our most popular map projection gives us a wildly distorted view of the world? Madness! Read on to find out why. Mercator Projection Created by Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, the Mercator projection is the world's most popular map, but gives us a very distorted view of the world as you get closer to the poles. Greenland (the ironically snow covered country up top) is actually relatively small. You could fit fourteen Greenlands inside of Africa. Fourteen! See how countries really compare below. OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR Greenland is tiny The United States isn't nearly as big as you thought Africa is huge, you could fit three Americas in here WHY IS IT LIKE THIS? IS EVERYTHING A LIE? Navigation is the Key The Mercator projection is hugely popular because of its role in navigation by sea. For these purposes it was uniquely suited because you can make straight lines of bearing between its meridians (or lines of longitude). What this means in plain English is that you can navigate with straight lines instead of curved ones on a flat map. It makes navigation much more straight forward, but it necessitates distortion. HOW DO I CORRECT THE MADNESS?? Galls-Peter Projection The Galls-Peter projection is considered a much more geographically accurate map projection than the mercator, but still suffers from distortion. You can see at the top and bottom that landmasses appear to squish while those near the equator tend to stretch. The choice of the West Wing cartogrophers. Winkel-Tripel Projection The Winkel-Tripel has the least skewness and fewest area errors of almost all projections available, and is probably the most geographically accurate. This is the choice of National Geographic. Goode Homosaline Projection Also known as the orange peel, the Goode Homosaline projection solves multiple problems with taking a round shape and making it flat. It doesn't introduce geographic or oceanic area that doesn't exist, and does a good job of avoiding distortion in land mass size. Brought to you by Badger Maps, Inc We would love it if you shared, but please link back to https://www.badgermapping.com BADGER Sources: http://www.geek.com/science/geek-answers-which-map-projection-is-best-1591108/ http://www.businessinsider.com/mercator-projection-v-gall-peters-projection-2013-12 http://www.vecteezy.com/map-vector/229-macdaddy-world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections Map of Africa with Countries - Single Color by FreeVectorMaps.com Map of World with Countries - Single Color by FreeVectorMaps.com Map of Greenland - SIngle Color by FreeVectorMaps.com Map of United States of America - Single Color by FreeVectorMaps.com cc 0 O Y SA This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

World of Maps

shared by jimmy-badger on Mar 06
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This shows how skewed our world becomes when we only know the Mercator projection. See the other alternatives that give us a better geographic idea of the world, along with why the Mercator is the mos...

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