Not All Maps Are Equal

The Plaza
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Reflecting the more than 90 year old wisdom of Alfred Korzybski in describing how the map is not the territory, last month the United Nations adopted resolution A/80/L.104 to Correct the Map. This movement addresses the long known fact that the “standard” Mercator map projections does not accurately represent relative land sizes, and the United Nations is calling for adoption of the Equal Earth Projection.

Learn more and explore the interactive comparison of these global maps at Correct The Map.

Global map with a vertical slider allowing viewer to compare the map of the worlds in Mercator versus Equal Earth proections

The UN recorded 164 votes in favor of the resolution, with 6 abstentions and only a single vote against it from a shrinking projected size North American country.

The Equal Earth projection map is made available for downloading and printing for free, the map has been put into the public domain.

There is a charter calling for organizations to sign as support and who pledge to use the more accurate map in their materials.

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For some more on this issue, it seems like we may not see this map in our apps

And noting from this article the infographic created by Kai Krause making the distortion of Mercator projection for Africa, see The True Size of Africa (public domain).

This in turn inspired developers James Talmage and Damon Maneice to create The True Size Of… a web site where you can recreate that kind of graphic comparing the sizes of other countries, continents. It’s fascinating!

According to the Ars Technica article, the developers were also inspired by map projections included in an episode of The West Wing

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While I am definitely supportive of the Equal Earth projection map I don’t like the slider tool that compares sizes, because it simply takes Mercator projection outlines and makes them smaller. But the amount of correction needed at the 49th parallel is quite different from the correction needed at, say, the 60th parallel. That’s why we get artifacts like the different lengths of the border for Canada and the US. A country like Canada should be wider at the bottom, narrower at the top (same for the US, which also has an inconsistent border length with Mexico).