The UN just dethroned the 500-year-old Mercator map
The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
In a nearly unanimous vote, the UN endorsed a resolution to promote maps that accurately reflect the true size of continents, challenging the 500-year-old Mercator projection. The decision, backed by the African Union, highlights how Mercator inflates the size of Europe and North America while shrinking the Global South. The UN's preferred alternative, Equal Earth, offers a balanced compromise between accuracy and shape distortion, marking a shift toward 'cognitive justice' in cartography.
Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation.
- holgerschurig
Weird title. Cargography constantly challenged itself. Look at some of the possible projections at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projections
They all compromise on something to enhance something else. You simply can't map the surface of a 3d shere (approximation of the earths globe) onto a 2d flat surface.
And so we have projections galore. And anyway was (and is) always free to use whatever fits best.
- JuniperMesos
I never had the impression that the Mercator projection, or indeed any particular world map projection out of the dozens in common use, had any kind of official status that needed to be removed. It seems obvious to me that different map projections have different tradeoffs, and that any particular publisher of a world map can and does use whichever one makes sense for the information they're trying to convey.
- JdeBP
I read the article thinking that it was not going to mention Dymaxion. Articles like this rarely do. The BBC has an article on the U.N. resolution (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5r60v4mro), and it does not.
And then right at the bottom it went and mentioned Dymaxion.
Dymaxion is one of the few projections that actually shows Antarctica with something resembling its actual shape. Interestingly, to counter the people who say that the best thing to learn from is an actual globe, a couple of children's globes of the world that I had as a child had large metal caps around the axle that obscured most of Antarctica.
Any decent atlas uses a variety of projections, of course. The tatty, second-hand, older-than-I-am atlas that I had at school was already on to Interrupted Mollweide's Homolographic by page 3. (-:
- simonw
I vibe-coded up an animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth (using D3) the other day, if anyone's interested in that comparison: https://tools.simonwillison.net/equal-earth
- bawolff
I feel like people are making more of a fuss about this then it is. The UNGA isn't a body that controls what maps its member states use. They can make the recommendation of course, but it has yet to be seen if anyone follows it.
- RamblingCTO
The comments overwhelmingly say: mercator isn't really in use. So what is this weird "decolonization" push then? Virtue signalling? I see it a lot from US-based people nowadays. Seems like a weird fetish as a European.
- flohofwoe
I would really like to know which parts of the world use Mercator projection on their standard school wall maps.
At least in Germany (and both former East and West) it certainly isn't in use since at least the 1950s (and probably much earlier), but instead a projection type that maps land masses closer to their actual relative sizes. Mercator is extremely rare and only used in very specialized professional maps (e.g. for navigation), but certainly not as the popular map projection in education.
Also don't schools use physical globes anymore?
This whole drama sounds like it's about a century late to the party tbh.
- petermcneeley
Ya people have no idea how big Africa truly is
Here is the UK in Africa:
https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTAyODQ3Nzg.NTkyNDI2Nw*...
Note of course this includes Scotland!
The traditional English are basically a dot.
- decimalenough
It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.
- kspacewalk2
Robinson projection is a good enough, boring compromise, if the UN was interested in that.