Welcome to the New World Map
Yesterday the UN General Assembly voted to replace its traditional world maps. My Equal Earth vs Web Mercator map allows you to compare how these two maps depict the world side-by-side.
Useful takeaways from this story.
Yesterday the UN General Assembly voted to replace its traditional world maps.
My Equal Earth vs Web Mercator map allows you to compare how these two maps depict the world side-by-side.
Drag the handle in the middle of the map and you can switch between the two projections.
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The useful part
Yesterday the UN General Assembly voted to replace its traditional world maps. My Equal Earth vs Web Mercator map allows you to compare how these two maps depict the world side-by-side. Drag the handle in the middle of the map and you can switch between the two projections.
How it works
- You can also pan and zoom around the map and the two views will move together.
- Equal Earth vs Mercator The problem with Mercator isn't that it is a "bad" map.
- Gerardus Mercator's 1569 projection was designed for sea navigation, where preserving angles and directions is enormously useful.
- The problem is that it is a rather unfortunate choice when you want to compare the size of countries and continents.
- On a conventional Mercator world map it can look comparable in size to Africa, whereas Africa is actually about 14 times larger.
What to take from it
Equal Earth was designed to solve precisely this problem. Developed by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny and published in 2018, it is an equal-area projection. Countries and continents therefore retain their correct relative areas, although their shapes are inevitably changed in the process.
Details worth keeping
with a map that more accurately reflects the size of Africa.
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