Everything you know is wrong

Posted on Nov 16, 2007 in Design | 2 comments

Well, at least everything you know about geography. To celebrate acknowledge the end of Geography Awareness Week (seriously; it’s the third week in Nov.) I thought I’d share a discovery I made a few weeks ago. Fair warning: you may find this disturbing.

Getting it wrong

Let’s start with a quiz: Which is bigger, Greenland or Africa? (Take a look at a map; I’ll wait). Some of you may have even known the map so well you quickly answered “Greenland!” with a smile, proud you knew the answer. But you’re wrong. Greenland occupies about 0.8 million square miles, while Africa comprises 11.6 million! That’s fourteen and a half times bigger!

Don’t feel too bad if you got it wrong. It’s not really your fault; it’s what you were taught growing up. So was I. That’s why I was so astounded when I noticed a “strange” map in a survey’s office window. Upon inspection I learned it was a Peters Projection map:

Who knew mapping was so tough?

Besides his cool first name, German historian Arno Peters is known for presenting a new map of the world in 1973. It differed from the ubiquitous map of the world, called the Mercator projection (it’s the one that appears in all of the maps in the search link above), because it is area-accurate.

I don’t claim to know much about map-making, nor will I try to fully explain the intricacies and trade-offs cartographers deal with when devising flat versions of a sphere. (If you’re interested, Wikipedia has lots of info on this topic). But what it comes down to is this: the Mercator projection was devised in the late 1500s by a European for sailors. Its lines are true and shapes accurate, but it distorts the sizes of areas; this is especially true the further an area is from the equator.

Peters, who was interested in equality (good for him!), introduced his Gall-Peters Projection map with the hopes it would eliminate the Western- and northern-centric bias inherent in the Mercator projection. Think about it: where’s the center of the Mercator map? Europe. Where does its equator run? Sixty percent—not halfway—up from the bottom of the map. His concern was non-Western peoples were being discriminated against by overstating the size, and therefore dominance/power, of the northern hemisphere. (The northern hemisphere occupies 18.9 million square miles; the southern, 38.6. Yet it appears much larger on the Mercator projection.)

Another benefit of the Gall-Peters map: all north-south lines are parallel; all east-west lines are parallel, so accurate comparisons can be easily made. That would come in handy when answering questions like “which is further north: LA or Las Vegas?”

Getting better

Peters’ version isn’t the only attempt to rectify the Euro-centric word view: the Aussie’s have their “upside down” world map, too. There are probably others, too. Maybe ones showing Madagascar as the center of the map? Whatever country is in the center is is somewhat arbitrary, right?

Even my beloved Google Maps, which I cannot lavish enough praise upon, uses the Mercator projection and therefore inaccurately depicts the relative sizes of the continents. Maybe one day they’ll change, or at least offer a choice. But it is heartening to read that some atlases are using a dual approach to offer the best 2-D representation of our 3-D globe. The Mercator is used for near-equator areas, while areas nearer the poles are shown in equal-area projections.

Keep all that in mind next time you look at a map.