Pay attention to the map below:
You’ve probably already come across such a map, either on the internet or in a school textbook. It is based on the so-called Mercator Projection, created in 1559 by the geographer Gerhard Kremer (better known as Gerhard Mercator). His work was revolutionary, as the model that bears his name is considered the first representation of the world with all continents after the European maritime expansion.
But there’s a problem: the areas of some of the countries are distorted (a lot!). Nations like Russia and Canada, for example, are much bigger than they really are. Doubt? The map below, made by a Reddit user, compares the Mercator Projection measurements with the true extents of each country:
Why does it happen?
As the Earth is a sphere, it is not possible to represent it on a flat map without any distortion. In the case of Mercator, the cartographic projection is of the cylindrical type. It is as if the map formed a cylinder surrounding the terrestrial globe.
This type of projection preserves the angles of each territory and, therefore, is still used today for maritime navigation, for example. However, when it comes to flattening the Earth, areas are distorted – especially far from the equator. On these maps, Greenland, an autonomous region of Denmark, appears to be twice the size of Brazil, which is far from being true: the island has an area of 2.1 million km², while our country has 8.5 million km².
But there are other ways to represent our planet. Still on cylindrical projections, other geographers, such as the American Arthur H. Robinson and the German Arno Peters, adapted Mercator’s work and created their own versions.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Peters tried to prioritize emerging countries, giving them more prominence. He believed that maps are, in one way or another, symbolic manifestations of power, and that showing richer countries with areas larger than reality was a problem. Robinson, on the other hand, smoothed out the distortions at the extremes of the planet. Map version of it, created in the 60s, is the most used in current atlases.
But there are other conical projections, which result in a fan-shaped map, and the polar (or azimuthal), which gives the view of the planet “seen from above”, by the North Pole. It is worth mentioning that there is no better or worse type than the other – each projection can be used for a different purpose.