Think of the world map and it’s likely we all imagine the same one. But that map, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, is inaccurate. It makes the western world seem bigger, diminishing the size of Africa and equatorial nations (Greenland looks as big as Africa – it’s roughly the size of Algeria), and prompting criticism that it promotes an imperialist viewpoint. So should we get a new world map? I asked Donald Houston, professor of geography at the University of Portsmouth.
Why is the internet telling me the map is a lie?
Mercator created the map on the eve of exploration for Europe, and wanted something that was useful for sea navigation. The problem is, the world is round and a map is flat. I give my first-year students an orange and ask them to peel it in one piece and lay it flat. It can’t be done – it rips and deforms. On a sphere, the longitudinal lines converge at the poles but at the equator run parallel. Mercator kept those longitudinal lines parallel throughout, prioritising the accuracy of the shape of the land. It ends up exaggerating land mass nearer the poles.
Oh, so he was only accidentally racist?
I’m not sure we could say he was a racist – he never travelled, and was more of a devout Catholic scholar.
Donald, I’m joking, I’m not trying to cancel Gerardus! I’m impressed he did all that with just his brain and a ruler. But we should probably have something accurate.
That’s the thing – it’s fundamentally impossible to get a nice, neat, rectangular but accurate map of the world. People have been suggesting using the Peters projection, but where Mercator distorts size but keeps shape, Peters is accurate with size but not shape. The best thing, I think, is a physical globe.
It’s quite poetic, really – how we humans long to hold the world in our hands but we never can.
Also, we don’t really need Mercator’s projection, because ships navigate using GPS. There are just so many reasons to move away from it. It emphasises nation states and borders, which are a western concept anyway. Why not a map that shows people, population numbers?
Right … that’s why maps are so brilliant, because they also tell you about a society’s priorities. But GPS isn’t perfect. I went up the Brecon Beacons using GPS – the signal crashed, I got lost, I must have trespassed on a dozen farms. Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t get shot.
That’s because your GPS is different from the ones ships use. But I do worry about Google Maps becoming the only map. It’s just a street map.
Oh my! I just opened Google Maps now and zoomed out to see the world. Even with all their tech, it looks as if they’re using something like Mercator. Greenland is huge!
Great … so an alien new arrival can think the world was made up of multinational food outlets. Mercator produced a map for navigation; the fact that it wasn’t challenged as the dominant map until the 1970s, and still adorns some Google maps, is shocking.
Right, I’m ordering a globe right now. How about the one that you can keep booze inside?
Well, they don’t have the poles, but why not. It might be a good thing to compensate for centuries of Mercator’s projection.
