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MERCATOR ’ S SOLUTION
In the 1500s , the mathematician Pedro Nunes suggested the idea of making a map projection where all these loxodromes were drawn as straight lines . He found a partial solution , and a few decades later his friend Gerardus Mercator really got it to work .
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Madagascar on a Mercator projection , they look about the same size . In reality , Madagascar is more than twice the size !
FUN FACT TRUMPET Take a look at https :// thetruesize . com to see exactly how maps such as the Mercator projection distort country sizes .
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Fuller in 1943 , can fold up into an icosahedron and is useful for looking at how landmasses are connected .
Dymaxion projection
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Gerardus Mercator was a geographer , cosmographer and cartographer from Flanders , in modern-day Belgium . The Mercator projection has a grid of horizontal and vertical lines corresponding to latitude and longitude AND it has straight loxodrome lines , so you can easily measure your compass bearings . This map projection is still the bee ’ s knees nearly 500 years later , but only as far as navigation is concerned .
Mercator projection
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The Mercator projection became very popular . Right up until the 1900s , this version of Earth was often printed in textbooks and hung up in classrooms . This worried some cartographers and academics . Did this view of the planet make equatorial regions seem less important than they really were ?
Some American cartographic societies eventually got so frustrated about the inaccuracy of flat , rectangular maps that they started printing leaflets stating that ‘ world maps have a powerful and lasting effect on peoples ’ impressions ’. They specifically mentioned the Mercator as a problem , and encouraged everyone to stop using any rectangular projection for general-use maps .
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The Azimuthal projection expands out from a single point , and is useful if you want to find out how far away anywhere in the world is from that point .
Azimuthal projection
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The things that make the Mercator projection useful for navigation also make it lousy for other purposes . It preserves the shapes of countries and direction , but it does not preserve size . Everything near the poles gets stretched out and everything on or near the equator is comparatively smooshed . |
The current general-use world map preferred by the National Geographic is known as the Winkel Tripel ( great name ,
ed ). Created by Oswald Winkel in 1921 , it strikes a pleasant balance between size and accuracy , with minimum distortion . It doesn ’ t preserve angles , so it can ’ t be used for navigation , but we have GPS now . Ships use satellites to navigate , so that ’ s not as much of a problem as it once was .
Winkel Tripel
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And , for a complete change in perspective , how about a south-up map ? |
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It just so happened that this projection made countries in the then ‘ developed ’ world such as the US , Canada and Northern Europe , look much larger than they really are , while at the same time shrinking the nations nearer the equator .
Surely it can ’ t skew things that badly ? Ed
You ’ d be surprised . For example , if you compare the United Kingdom with
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Perhaps the best way to combat map bias is to keep a variety of different projections around so you never get too stuck in one way of thinking . The Dymaxion projection , which was created by systems theorist Buckminster |
Yes , that ’ s right . We almost always see the world with north at the top , and south at the bottom . That might be because many of the world ’ s early cartographers were from the northern hemisphere , but a world map with the south at the top is no less correct . Do you think you could get used to looking at the world the other way up ? Why not try it and let us know . |
Words : Sylvia Morris . Illustration : Stacey Thomas |
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