Forget about the World Map, which everyone poked at since childhood

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

We have all seen the map of the world a thousand times. But what if this cat playing with Australia isn't really a cat at all? And Russia is not as huge as we all think?

Let's figure it out.

This is the famous Flemish cartographer and geographer Gerard KrEmer, aka Gerard Mercator in the Latin version.

It was he who first applied the conformal cylindrical projection when compiling a navigational map of the world on 18 sheets in 1569. How did this projection come about? In simple words, the cartographer made cuts on the surface of the globe from the north and from the south and put it in this form on a plane. Then I finished painting the picture between the cuts. As a result, the northern and southern regions expanded greatly, while the territories on the equator remained the same size.

Maybe if he rendered his projection digitally on a tablet, it would be more accurate? Who knows…

Now let's continue. And open the world map from Yandex. It is quite obvious that Russia is about twice the size and WIDER of Africa. But in fact, Africa is GREATER than Russia in width, by about 500 kilometers.

So … Russia is great, but Africa is still wider … The same principle applies to all other countries. Most modern maps do not reflect actual sizes and distances if they are located north and south of the equator. That is, the lands that are located in the northern and southern hemispheres are in reality less than what can be seen on the maps in the Mercator projection, created over the past few centuries.

How do you like such a global conspiracy? Moreover, the northern regions are especially strongly distorted. And this distortion is the greater, the further north the territories are located.

Another great example is Greenland. Look how huge it is. This area can fit two Australia! Greenland is visually even slightly larger than Africa!

Then why Australia and Africa are continents, and Greenland is considered an island? Or, for example, India and Mongolia, which are almost the same in size. But in fact, India is more than twice the size of Mongolia. And here is what Canada looks like in reality, for example, compared to Brazil. But if the Mercator projection does not reflect the real state of affairs, what about the other projections? Perhaps there is the most realistic among them. After all, someone had to guess how to transfer objects and distances from the surface of the planet to the plane without distortion.

For example, Equidistant Map Projection. It has a simple geometry, while maintaining the distance along the equator and all meridians. But here, too, there is a mess with the size and even the shape.

And this is Johann Lambert's Equal Area Cylindrical Projection, developed in 1772; the northern regions are unrealistically flattened here. Cartographic projection by James Gull and Arno Peters, created in the middle of the 19th century. Too flattened north and elongated equator. Miller's 1942 cylindrical projection. Better, but again we see huge Greenland and a rather compressed north.

And what is this anyway?

It feels like the paper has jammed while the card is being printed on the printer. This is what the Central cylindrical projection looks like. But these are not all options. There are also so-called pseudocylindrical projections. For example, the projection of Eckert (show), Guda (show), KavrAisky (show), Wagner (show) - by the way, not a bad option, only Antarctica is too large compared to its real size and is also somewhat flattened north. Conical projections do not reflect the situation in the lower southern hemisphere (show), so this option is not suitable.

Pseudo-conical - closer to the truth (show), but the forms of, for example, Australia and the Americas are too distorted. There are also azimuthal cartographic projections. They, too, are closer to the truth, but again, Australia and other territories located on the equator were heavily affected. By the way, these were the maps used by airplane pilots until the middle of the 20th century.

Of particular interest are polyhedral cartographic projections. For example, the so-called "butterfly" of Bernard Cahill And this version of his "butterfly", created in 1915, was used for intercontinental flights, which indicates the real distances between the main objects on the map. Here, the shapes of the continents and countries are not distorted, and the sizes, in principle, too. Or here's another similar card - Steve Waterman's butterfly. As you can see, the deformation is insignificant. Agree, this is much more realistic than the Mercator projection, where the northern regions are 2-3 times larger than they really are.