What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.
> I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.
> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand
Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
I'd bet a lot of money that Trump and all the others pushing for a U.S. "liberation" of Greenland also think it is a similar size to Africa, not 1/14th the size.
Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.
This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.
Citation needed. This feels like the entire hubub from leftists about how schools use the normal map because of racism and not because its actually useful.
Besides size, there's distance. Like it's kinda annoying how UK and France look much further apart than they actually are. That's why I was saying I'd be fine with this change if they weren't making it some kind of DEI for Africa. They're just fixing a misleading map.
It's worth noting that Equal Earth isn't an equidistant projection. The upper bound on distance distortion is an order of magnitude less than Mercator's though.
Unless your eye can casually assemble great circle routes it's hopeless on any projection except the radial one (and then only for routes emanating from one spot)
> Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
Precisely why, I suspect, the US voted against the change. (One of the reasons, at least) I mean, gee, I wonder why the country with the world's largest navy* would prefer maps where you can draw a line on the map between two points and it's the actual compass direction? (Give or take a bit of weirdness near the poles, where the difference between the Earth's rotational pole and its magnetic pole actually matters in a way it doesn't matter below the polar circles).
It's just a symbolic vote, of course, and nobody's navy is going to stop using the so-useful-for-maritime-navigation Mercator just because of this UN vote. But still, I would bet that factored into the reasoning. How much? Who knows, I certainly couldn't say. Except to suspect that it was a non-trivial factor.
* Largest by tonnage — China and Russia have more total ships, with the US in third place by ship count, but the US has nearly half the number of aircraft carriers in the entire world, 11 out of a total of 23, and aircraft carriers are some of the heaviest ships out there. Numbers are from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-n...
I doubt that was a factor at all. As you say, voting for this wouldn’t change the maps a navy uses anyway. Besides, navies aren’t normally using world maps, they use maps for specific regions.
The vote was because the US is an intransigent rogue state at this point, and it doesn’t want to accept any outside influence whatsoever.
Same, I'm also just barely old enough that a lot of the wall maps in elementary school were from the Cold War and remember thinking the USSR was like 1/4 the world's surface area thanks to the Mercator projection.
My teachers had to remind students so many times that the size for Greenland was just way off but it was hard for that to sink in for a kid used to seeing it every single day.
It's not the most pressing issue in the world, but long-term, maps do shape conceptions about the world that we don't personally know. So it might be symbolic, but symbols are powerful.
>I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.
The UN is a body that is intended to facilitate global cooperation. This symbolic change better represents the body's members and updates an incorrect visualization, which leads to better cooperation and representation.
Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.
There's nothing incorrect about the Mercator projection, unless your definition of incorrect covers every flat map and calls only globes correct. Every flat map projection has to make some compromises.
For the purposes I use world maps for, correct relative sizing is the paramount thing I'm looking for in a projection. I generally use it to give me a rough idea of distances. Boggs seems inferior, at a glance I have no idea how far it is from NYC to London, for example. I feel like Mercator is similarly bad in terms of distances being uniform. What do you use maps for where Boggs is superior?
It's great they want to find a projection that better represents the real geography, but at the end of the day you're still trying to unwrap a sphere onto a square. Personally I feel the schools mentioned here would get better mileage out of buying (more) old fashioned globes, and encouraging the kids to learn geography that way.
Tbh, I don't see the use case for Robinson when Winkel-Tripel exists. For almost all use cases where you need a political world map, Winkel-Tripel is the better choice.
Equal earth also has its uses, it's a neat and clean map, but has more distortion in shape, which might be undesirable.
I'm partial to the Goode Homolosine projection, next is whatever NatGeo standardized on. Of course, the best is an actual globe --but decent sized ones are too expensive and the beach ball ones are just not very well made.
"And since we often, without thinking, use size as a proxy for importance or power, this subtly reinforces a sense of northern superiority over the global south."
We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s
I think a "reversed" south-at-the-top is a good idea to at least be aware of. I don't think it makes sense to reverse it since it just flips the problem, but it is (very slightly?) unlucky for the southern hemisphere.
Not sure why UN is taken seriously today. Isn't that a club of corrupt drunkards who meet from time to time to fart in their chairs and spout nonsense?
Well, unfortunately it's clubs of corrupt drunkards farting in chairs all the way down to 9-member housing association. The difference is in how much power each club is allowed to have and advertise at any given moment.
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
People say Russia, Canada and Greenland look big in the Mercator projection, but what they miss is it makes Antarctica enormous, your app shows it nicely. So much so that many maps just cut off the bottom otherwise it looks a bit silly, but then the equator isn't in the middle.
The mercator projection has neither a top nor a bottom, it extends infinitely upwards and downwards. Hence all visualizations of it cut it off at some arbitrary point. Making antarctica humorously large does nothing besides make a point.
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.
It still does. I have one going through my house too. The problem is nobody else knows or cares about those meridians. It's quite fortunate the US didn't invent its own, what with its zeal for being different. We're quite lucky to still have just the one.
Yeah, the prime meridian selection is the actually colonial part of the Mercator map. It's not like they were trying to make Europe look big, but they were trying to make London central.
The prime meridian being the least skewed area of the equal earth and Robinson projections, with their bulgy nature, actually serves to make them both offer somewhat inconvenient depictions of places like Alaska and New Zealand and Japan.
Mercator is far more globally evenhanded in that regard, being a cylindrical projection.
In summary there is a border dispute between California and Nevada, It was exacerbated by some surveying errors but the real problem appears to be the definitions of the sate borders, California was defined using one method(120 degrees longitude west of Greenwich) and Nevada was defined using another method (37 degrees longitude west of Washington) at the time it was thought these two methods were compatible but it later turned out they are not. Congress does not have the authority to change state borders so it is up to the states to reach an agreement. and they have not. So the dispute is still technically on going.
Researching this also lead to the most hilarious passive aggressive thing I have seen in a constitution.
"All territory lying West of and adjoining the boundary line herein prescribed, which the State of California may relinquish to the Territory or State of Nevada, shall thereupon be embraced within and constitute a part of this State."
We really wanted that area east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, they would form a perfect natural boundary, but CA has already claimed it. If CA ever wants to give it up we want to make sure it is explicitly in the constitution to accept it.
I just got nerd sniped by the room map in the movie, it is a minor 30 second scene where the clerk shows the guests a map of the hotel so they can pick their room.
The hotel in question is placed so it bisects the CA/NV state line. this line is north/south (there is a compass rose present) so we know Lake Tahoe is south of the hotel(the center of Lake Tahoe is where the state line stop going north/south and turns to the south east) And the movie places the hotel to be near Lake Tahoe.
However that map has a arrow pointing north marked "The Lake".
Oh no my immersion is ruined How terrible. Except, I half suspect the map designer did that on purpose, A subtle gag, sort of planting the fictional hotel in "the twilight zone"
The location of the 0 longitude line has less to do with the British colonial empire as such, and more to do with the fact that the British were the first people on Earth to invent a way of measuring longitude at sea accurately (John Harrison's famous marine chronometer). Of course these are ultimately related facts - the same package of technology that allowed the British to produce people like John Harrison who were capable of innovating a marine chronometer also allowed them to produce ocean-going ships that could conquer a global maritime colonial empire (and that had a use for marine chronometers).
There was in fact a rival 0 longitude line passing through Paris, France, that the French used for many years before standardizing on the British system; although this system would equally have resulted in the 0,0 point being somewhere in the ocean west of the African coast.
> Of course these are ultimately related facts - the same package of technology that allowed the British to produce people like John Harrison who were capable of innovating a marine chronometer also allowed them to produce ocean-going ships that could conquer a global maritime colonial empire (and that had a use for marine chronometers).
The causality you gloss over seems to be more important than the causality you'd like us to focus on. The ships came first.
> and more to do with the fact that the British were the first people on Earth to invent a way of measuring longitude at sea accurately
...OTH if Britain wouldn't have been a globe-spanning empire, they wouldn't have needed a more precise way to measure longitude, and probably wouldn't have invented it ;)
E.g. the Brits had built a whole government body around the task, which then resulted in a competition, with Harrison's chronometer coming out as winner:
In an alternate reality, the prime meridian could have been chosen to pass through Florence, making 180° and the edges of the world map pass cleanly through the Bering Strait.
Oh, this is just getting started when it comes to upsetting traditionalists. I'd wager that the majority of map-reading happens on a screen these days, using software maps that can be rotated without changing the relative orientation of the labels.
...So why is it "Sub-Saharan Africa"? Why not "Super-Saharan Africa"? "Dexterous-Saharan Africa"? "Sinister-Saharan Africa?" It's all just convention (that just happen to favor Eurocentric notions). "Free your mind." -Morpheus
The distortions in maps with non orthogonal axes are evident already looking at Europe (though with centering at Greenwich). So, not just the "Map of America (of the Americas)" or "Map of Australia"... The compromises are just everywhere. Of course.
(Yes, I get what you meant. I am just suggesting other angles.)
For quite a few years, and because I don't have a globe, I've turned to MapFight [0] to get a good idea of size/area comparisons for countries, significant geographic features and for historical lands/empires.
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. (-:
Even computer maps at the time like Google Earth had distortion around the poles, as if they were pieced together in slices. So that combined with the globe caps are why I never really knew what they looked like as a kid.
> 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.
"I had toy globes which, unlike actual globes, covered up significant chunks of Earth, so actual globes are bad"
Honestly it's so difficult to find a map that satisfies all of one's requirements for teaching kids if you're a bit rigorous.
I might be asking bit too much but I want Antarctica to be shown correctly, I want all microstates to be shown, I want all the "(UK)" and "(FR)" mentions for overseas territories to be there, ideally Taipei to be shown as a capital, etc, and that's only what I care about, I'm sure there are dozens of other details I don't think of that are wrong on most maps.
I ended up making my own world map with d3 (that was 10 years ago, I don't know what I would use today) and print it at a print shop. I printed a dymaxion map (with ocean blue for the gaps) and another more "normal" projection though I don't actually remember which one, with Antarctica as an insert. It wasn't even expensive, and in addition I was able to put all the names in both French and Dutch.
You might assume that in Belgium, it would at least be possible to find bilingual maps but no, if you can find one that's not in English you're already lucky.
Both the world's population (with 88% to 12%) and landmass (with 68% to 32%) favor the northern hemisphere, so it makes sense to favor it in a general map as well.
Australians are mostly the descendants of British colonists (and prisoners) - the most successful colonizers in history - so the answer is what you might expect.
You might get a kick out of the AuthaGraph projection, if you haven't seen it before (although Antarctica may be a smidge distorted relative to dymaxion)
I really like oblique projections. Have you seen this neat one from Kerkovits - A Low-Distortion Oblique Map Projection of the World’s Landmasses (2024)?
As the article says, all protections have some distortions and it's just a matter of which ones you chose.
It's totally reasonable and rational for the African association of cartographer to push for this change - it makes their continent look bigger. At the margin, their children can look at the map and feel more significant.
On the flip side, this particular map makes Europe look smaller. So it means that at the margin, European children will look at the map and feel less significant.
It doesn't shock me that the US voted against it. I am surprised that others voted for it, and diminished themselves.
Because it’s focusing purely on how big continents “look” without even mentioning the issue of actual size. That is not, in any credible sense, “carefully neutral”.
I don't think "European children will look at the map and feel less significant" is a carefully neutral observation. It's an assumption that European children feel superiority because their country is slightly bigger.
If anything, I expect the accurate sizes set the stage for feeling superiority over their ancestors colonizing huge lands while coming from tiny countries.
If we're talking about kids, they should just get taught this type of geography using a globe. You can get an accurate (enough) inflatable globe for like 3 euros, including shipping.
I think understand what you're trying to say, that the relative sizes of countries on the map is not of any particular importance, and that it certainly does not affect the pride one feels in one's country positively or negatively.
Yet, it was clearly very important for the governments of the formerly smaller countries to be shown to be larger on the official UN map. Otherwise, why bother with a vote?
I think the ones who got diminished did it for both idealistic and PR reasons.
I mean, if you're France or the UK, you want to keep good relationships with Africa, and probably do feel some minor guilt about colonialism. This is a vote that costs you little, so it's reasonable you'd side with it.
If it were possible to correct the size distortions with no downside, support would be unanimous. The problem is that that's impossible, and correcting the size distortion requires introducing some other kind of worse distortion. Equal Earth in particular introduces very severe shape distortion anywhere not near the center of the map (e.g., look how skewed Alaska is).
> European children will look at the map and feel less significant.
They might instead feel even more more "important" for achieving so much with such a small territory. I know I was somewhat shocked as a kid when I learnt that France was that small country when I had always thought for some reason that it was Greenland (vaguely the same shape I guess, and big enough to feel like it was important).
Instead France was just this small piece of land and it was still so important, and it felt a bit impressive.
I think the thing is people will find a way to feel significant one way or another, and maps probably aren't the main means of doing so.
Why does the size of a county's territory matter so much? Russia is much bigger than the US or China, is it more important? Australia has about three quarters of the land area of the US, is it as significant?
Humans live in a world made of symbols. A sign, in this case a map, carries much more than its literal meaning. It is loaded with context, connotation, and even myths.
Maps are extremely powerful signs because they implicitly claim to organize the physical world. Consider, for example, the reference viewpoint of a map regardless of other features.
The first time you see a map centered on another continent makes you realize that your vision of the world, where some parts are peripheral, is relative. Even if that fact is obvious.
I don't know exactly what the effects of a change of projection are, but I know they exist.
> On the flip side, this particular map makes Europe look smaller. So it means that at the margin, European children will look at the map and feel less significant.
Why should we ever care about how the look of our country on a map? Most people expect the default projection, Mercator, to preserve sizes, which is wrong. New projection does. We get closer to the truth all together. Truth is good. The only good thing to happen internationally in the last two years (of course some random country would oppose it).
Size of the country does not matter. Canada is large yet not so populated. Antartica is large and a desert. The Sahara is gigantic, still a desert. Population, infrastructure, culture, natural resources, matter immensely more.
With computer generated maps, you can just always use a minimally distorting conical or polar projection centered on the exact point you’re focusing on.
That also happens to be broadly what you would get looking straight down at the earth from above that point, which seems like it would also be the least confusing option.
Yes. Specially, touch enabled screens with dynamically rendered graphics.
The Google Maps app on my iPhone at one point years ago switched to having a globe as its base, like Google Earth. It was great.
Then Google switched it back to Mercator. But you can scroll infinitely to the left or right, so its base is actually now “Mercator rolled into a tube.” Somehow that’s even worse!
The projection you see with your eyes is actually not that great in a sense. You can only see half of the world at a time and it's quite distorted as you move towards the edge. Also on a computer you should be able to spin any map projection, not just a globe.
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.
Yeah, that's my thoughts as well. The answer is literally in the article:
> Mercator useful for sailing
This is the only correct answer, and everything else is unscientific nonsense. It hasn't been replaced because... it just hasn't. Mercator + knots + nautical miles is a system that is extremely useful for navigation. Since we aren't sailing ships around a whole lot anymore, a lot of teachers forget to mention the relationship between the three. I imagine that was more common knowledge back in the day.
That being said, I do like the new proposed projection for how we use maps today. I think another useful tool would simply be overlay maps.
And only 1852m at sea level; since it's an angular distance it's a bit longer in the air and a bit shorter underwater (~ 29 cm per km of elevation change).
If you do positioning in degrees, minutes, and seconds (or decimal minutes which I guess is more common nowadays), a 'natural' length unit for navigation is a minute of longitude, which is the original definition of the nautical mile. And then we get velocity as nautical miles per hour, or knots.
Blame the French for reinventing the wheel instead of, say, using a 1/1000th of a nautical mile as the definition of the metre. Alas, that's all water under the bridge by now.
If you want to do navigation in SI units, the UTM projections (see sibling thread) typically do positioning in metres inside each grid square.
Funnily enough the metre is defined by the globe as well: the arc from the equator to North pole is defined as 10,000 km. I think this might be where the alternative angle metrics came from, which went with the metre:
full circle is 400 grad, so a right angle (10,000 km) is 100 grad.
Then minutes and seconds are factors of 100, so a centesimal minute is 1 km and 1 centesimal second is 10 m.
Originally it was defined like that, but it was fairly quickly redefined as the distance between marks on a prototype platinum bar. It's had a couple of other definitions since then, but it's currently defined "by taking the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299 792 458 when expressed in the unit ms⁻¹, where the second is defined in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs".
> that isn't a change to the definition of the meter
How is it not? it's not a change to the actual distance (well, it is for a sufficient precision), but a change to the definition of the metre is exactly what it is. It's defined relative to the speed of light rather than a random platinum bar length, with the constant picked so that the actual measurement stay the same (up to a certain level of precision).
Mercator is also useful for tiled maps, which is why web Mercator is a standard. The tiles always have nice north/south and east/west bounds and there is no difference in rendering depending on longitude or latitude. For software maps the better approach, as done by Google, is just to postprocess the Mercator tiles into a sphere at rendering time if the user is zoomed out enough.
While most of that system is a way to tag coordinates that are "simpler" than just latitude and longitude to a position, it's underlying system is also the Mercator projection. And some properties of Mercator, e.g. that it is angle-correct. So you can use UTM e.g. in Elint for direction finding.
It's not distance or area correct, but for normal infantry this is meaningless, since this only shows on large scales, but not the slow scales of infantry.
The transverse Mercator projection is completely different than what people are complaining about. The UTM system is roughly what you get if you only take a narrow band of the ordinary Mercator projection near the equator, but turn the globe 90°, and use the projection for a narrow strip of a specific longitude, with a different projection for each strip, overlapping at the seams.
It was adopted by the US military between WWI and WWII, and similar projections were adopted by other militaries around the same time, because earlier (non-conformal) map projections led to dramatic errors when they were used for artillery targeting.
That's like saying: we've got a bad map representation but if we ignore the edges where it's wildly inaccurate, it almost lines up with our entirely non-standard system of distances. It's multiple questionable systems locking together.
You could just draw kilometre lines on the map, you know.
The UN is a ceremonial organization that occasionally we get agreement on measurement units.
That's not what they teach in school though, and I think that genuinely is misinformation for Americans trying to understand international relations.
K12 teachers could almost get away with the one sentence: "Right is only a question among equals, for the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must."
A version of it including political borders my desktop wallpaper for a long time, until I decided to not change default wallpaper on my new devices anymore.
Calling it Equal Earth was a bad move. The word “equal” has tons of baggage. Why not call it something less incendiary like Actual Earth or something? What ever happened to being pragmatic?
It’s been called Equal Earth since 2018. The word “equal” here (likely?) refers to the fact it’s an equal-area projection, although it could be politically charged.
The word "equal" has been used in maths since centuries without any baggage at all. And since a projection (how to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat surface) is a mathematical undertaking it's perfectly fine to think in mathematical terms.
I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.
Also, this "this is loaded, let's use something else" is puny. Decades ago, "fat" was loaded. So people used "strong" --- which is IMHO blatantly wrong. But hey, people still said it derogatory, so it was burned in that context. Then it became "big". But the derogatory use stayed, so that term is now also burned in that context. And then "obese" is now used ... guess how long it takes still that word is burned, too. Seldom do people realize that they shouldn't fight the wording, but the derogatory use. But instead they attack the words. The situation stays as is, but word after word becomes taboo. How nonsensical!
Also observe how I wrote "in that context". I talked about "fat", "big" and "strong" in context of body mass. But then some SJW come and declare these words to be bad in any context. Eventually we can't fish a big fish anymore ... because some idiots hijacked the meaning of "big".
Loading up completely normal words is IMHO nonsense. In conclusion, Equal Earth is, to me, a very fine name.
> The word "equal" has been used in maths since centuries without any baggage at all. …
> I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.
Certainly “equal” is a perfectly normal word used normally in all sorts of circumstances, including equal‐area map projections. That said, while I wouldn’t call it “baggage,” it’s impossible to separate the Equal Earth projection from the context in which it was created: the previous most notorious equal‐area projection, Gall–Peters, was heavily pushed (both when it was popularized in the 1970s and when it regained a surge of popularity in the 2010s/2020s) by promoting the idea that use of non‐equal‐area projections causes westerners to subconsciously internalize feelings of superiority over the poor oppressed Global South based on the distorted size of their home countries on a map. This idea is, shall we say, controversial and not universally accepted. But if you read the original UN resolution that was voted on, it’s clear that the UN representatives believe it (or say they believe it, anyway).
In that context, it seems absolutely clear that the name “Equal Earth” was a very intentional double entendre by the authors of the projection. I don’t fault the authors for coming up with such a catchy name, but I feel strongly it’s important to push back against the false idea that establishing use of equal‐area projections is some meaningful act of restorative social justice.
I don't get why people say this / focus on Africa in this conversation. I've never thought Africa was small and was taught about the Berlin Conference, etc in school.
All the large continents are near the equator and hence the relative size of Africa, Australia, North/South America, Asia is not affected much by the projection. Antarctica is big too, even though wildly exaggerated by Mercator.
If anything, it makes more sense to say people don't realize how small UK/Europe is.
I for one am disappointed that it took 500 years for people to acknowledge that the most important consideration when choosing a map is its emotional impact on the people of Africa.
Continents are in truesizeof btw. Asia is much bigger than Africa, North America is only a little smaller. When you account for the Sahara Desert of course, there is more usable land in North America.
Just drag South America or Australia onto Africa and tell me it changed more than a few percent in size. Barely perceptible.
North America is not 21.3 but 24.7e^6 m^3 according to google, so the ratio is 4:3. Asia to Africa is 3:2
Arable in your stats just means cultivated, it isn't a measure of the natural productivity. People in Africa work poorer lands due to necessity.
North America has more non-desert land than Africa and produces 3x as much food. Asia nearly 10x food production. Europe 2x. Antarctica has no non-desert land and Australia has very little. Asia has the most by a long way. This lines up pretty well with each continent's historical economic significance.
Regarding 'small Africa' conspiracy - I have never not been told that Africa is a huge continent. Documentaries, podcasts, TED talks, movies, Top Gear, books, atlases (they all have multiple projections btw), globes, video games. Five weeks in a balloon? I may have consumed well over 100 hours of media romanticizing the vast scale of Africa. Colonialists had no reason to conceal it either - selling big Africa investment (exploitation) opportunities was their business model
This is a Mandela effect moment for me. Or maybe it's an American education thing?
No its just people lying. I remember being told 30 years ago that a flat map and a globe make countries look different since a kid asked why continenents looked different when we were looking at a globe
> I don't get why people say this / focus on Africa in this conversation.
Because the resolution specifically talks about the supposed injustice Mercator has perpertrated upon Africa over the centuries, and loudly trumpets that adopting Equal Earth is an act of reparation toward Africa.
“Noting the proclamation by the African Union of 2025 as the year of “Justice
for Africans and people of African descent through reparations”, and decision
Assembly/AU/Dec.942 (XXXIX), adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and
Government of the African Union in February 2026 in Addis Ababa, endorsing the
period 2026–2035 as a decade of action dedicated to justice for Africans and people
of African descent through reparations,”
“Noting with satisfaction the adoption by the African Union of the Equal Earth
cartographic projection, which more accurately represents the sizes of all continents,
particularly Africa,”
“Convinced that correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes
constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation, understood as
promoting accurate geographical knowledge, as well as historical truth, education and
awareness-raising, and promotes mutual understanding among peoples,”
“Affirms that cartographic distortions of continental sizes inherited from
history have cognitive, educational, cultural, geopolitical and socioeconomic impacts
and constitute historical biases, the correction of which will promote recognition,
justice and development, particularly with regard to the African continent;”
“Recognizes that the Mercator projection, widely used around the world,
particularly distorts, from the perspective of area representation, continental masses
located far from the equator, resulting in a proportional shrinkage of Africa and other
regions;”
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[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 14.2 ms ] threadMy personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection
This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.
> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand
Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.
This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.
Citation needed. This feels like the entire hubub from leftists about how schools use the normal map because of racism and not because its actually useful.
Of course they were lying the entire time.
What sort of tasks besides a size measuring contest is an equal area projection good for?
Precisely why, I suspect, the US voted against the change. (One of the reasons, at least) I mean, gee, I wonder why the country with the world's largest navy* would prefer maps where you can draw a line on the map between two points and it's the actual compass direction? (Give or take a bit of weirdness near the poles, where the difference between the Earth's rotational pole and its magnetic pole actually matters in a way it doesn't matter below the polar circles).
It's just a symbolic vote, of course, and nobody's navy is going to stop using the so-useful-for-maritime-navigation Mercator just because of this UN vote. But still, I would bet that factored into the reasoning. How much? Who knows, I certainly couldn't say. Except to suspect that it was a non-trivial factor.
* Largest by tonnage — China and Russia have more total ships, with the US in third place by ship count, but the US has nearly half the number of aircraft carriers in the entire world, 11 out of a total of 23, and aircraft carriers are some of the heaviest ships out there. Numbers are from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-n...
The vote was because the US is an intransigent rogue state at this point, and it doesn’t want to accept any outside influence whatsoever.
My teachers had to remind students so many times that the size for Greenland was just way off but it was hard for that to sink in for a kid used to seeing it every single day.
Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.
Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.
Equal earth also has its uses, it's a neat and clean map, but has more distortion in shape, which might be undesirable.
I have a Waterman on my wall :)
https://xkcd.com/977/
I'm partial to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2256:_Bad_Map_Pro...
[1] https://geospatialstuff.com/posts/2025/05/16/xkcd-bad-projec...
We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s
https://mapdesign.icaci.org/2014/02/mapcarte-38365-mcarthurs...
But still, it's not a red flag in this particular example.
Mercator is far more globally evenhanded in that regard, being a cylindrical projection.
Featuring all 244 American States!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe#Interstate_boundary...
In summary there is a border dispute between California and Nevada, It was exacerbated by some surveying errors but the real problem appears to be the definitions of the sate borders, California was defined using one method(120 degrees longitude west of Greenwich) and Nevada was defined using another method (37 degrees longitude west of Washington) at the time it was thought these two methods were compatible but it later turned out they are not. Congress does not have the authority to change state borders so it is up to the states to reach an agreement. and they have not. So the dispute is still technically on going.
Researching this also lead to the most hilarious passive aggressive thing I have seen in a constitution.
"All territory lying West of and adjoining the boundary line herein prescribed, which the State of California may relinquish to the Territory or State of Nevada, shall thereupon be embraced within and constitute a part of this State."
We really wanted that area east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, they would form a perfect natural boundary, but CA has already claimed it. If CA ever wants to give it up we want to make sure it is explicitly in the constitution to accept it.
The hotel in question is placed so it bisects the CA/NV state line. this line is north/south (there is a compass rose present) so we know Lake Tahoe is south of the hotel(the center of Lake Tahoe is where the state line stop going north/south and turns to the south east) And the movie places the hotel to be near Lake Tahoe.
However that map has a arrow pointing north marked "The Lake".
Oh no my immersion is ruined How terrible. Except, I half suspect the map designer did that on purpose, A subtle gag, sort of planting the fictional hotel in "the twilight zone"
There was in fact a rival 0 longitude line passing through Paris, France, that the French used for many years before standardizing on the British system; although this system would equally have resulted in the 0,0 point being somewhere in the ocean west of the African coast.
The causality you gloss over seems to be more important than the causality you'd like us to focus on. The ships came first.
Empire -> need for chronometers -> chronometers.
...OTH if Britain wouldn't have been a globe-spanning empire, they wouldn't have needed a more precise way to measure longitude, and probably wouldn't have invented it ;)
E.g. the Brits had built a whole government body around the task, which then resulted in a competition, with Harrison's chronometer coming out as winner:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_Longitude
...So why is it "Sub-Saharan Africa"? Why not "Super-Saharan Africa"? "Dexterous-Saharan Africa"? "Sinister-Saharan Africa?" It's all just convention (that just happen to favor Eurocentric notions). "Free your mind." -Morpheus
(Yes, I get what you meant. I am just suggesting other angles.)
[0] https://www.mapfight.xyz/
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. (-:
"I had toy globes which, unlike actual globes, covered up significant chunks of Earth, so actual globes are bad"
Solid logic, mate.
I might be asking bit too much but I want Antarctica to be shown correctly, I want all microstates to be shown, I want all the "(UK)" and "(FR)" mentions for overseas territories to be there, ideally Taipei to be shown as a capital, etc, and that's only what I care about, I'm sure there are dozens of other details I don't think of that are wrong on most maps.
I ended up making my own world map with d3 (that was 10 years ago, I don't know what I would use today) and print it at a print shop. I printed a dymaxion map (with ocean blue for the gaps) and another more "normal" projection though I don't actually remember which one, with Antarctica as an insert. It wasn't even expensive, and in addition I was able to put all the names in both French and Dutch.
You might assume that in Belgium, it would at least be possible to find bilingual maps but no, if you can find one that's not in English you're already lucky.
https://files.catbox.moe/k11gqq.avif
Can't let the felon know how small Greenland is. The toadies must protect his psyche at all costs.
It's good to have political opinions. But please don't use HN as a place to try to pick a fight with people who might disagree.
It's totally reasonable and rational for the African association of cartographer to push for this change - it makes their continent look bigger. At the margin, their children can look at the map and feel more significant.
On the flip side, this particular map makes Europe look smaller. So it means that at the margin, European children will look at the map and feel less significant.
It doesn't shock me that the US voted against it. I am surprised that others voted for it, and diminished themselves.
If anything, I expect the accurate sizes set the stage for feeling superiority over their ancestors colonizing huge lands while coming from tiny countries.
If we're talking about kids, they should just get taught this type of geography using a globe. You can get an accurate (enough) inflatable globe for like 3 euros, including shipping.
Yet, it was clearly very important for the governments of the formerly smaller countries to be shown to be larger on the official UN map. Otherwise, why bother with a vote?
I mean, if you're France or the UK, you want to keep good relationships with Africa, and probably do feel some minor guilt about colonialism. This is a vote that costs you little, so it's reasonable you'd side with it.
Both kids in Europe and Africa will actually end up with a more correct idea of how large both their continents are.
They might instead feel even more more "important" for achieving so much with such a small territory. I know I was somewhat shocked as a kid when I learnt that France was that small country when I had always thought for some reason that it was Greenland (vaguely the same shape I guess, and big enough to feel like it was important).
Instead France was just this small piece of land and it was still so important, and it felt a bit impressive.
I think the thing is people will find a way to feel significant one way or another, and maps probably aren't the main means of doing so.
Maps are extremely powerful signs because they implicitly claim to organize the physical world. Consider, for example, the reference viewpoint of a map regardless of other features.
The first time you see a map centered on another continent makes you realize that your vision of the world, where some parts are peripheral, is relative. Even if that fact is obvious.
I don't know exactly what the effects of a change of projection are, but I know they exist.
Why should we ever care about how the look of our country on a map? Most people expect the default projection, Mercator, to preserve sizes, which is wrong. New projection does. We get closer to the truth all together. Truth is good. The only good thing to happen internationally in the last two years (of course some random country would oppose it).
Size of the country does not matter. Canada is large yet not so populated. Antartica is large and a desert. The Sahara is gigantic, still a desert. Population, infrastructure, culture, natural resources, matter immensely more.
That also happens to be broadly what you would get looking straight down at the earth from above that point, which seems like it would also be the least confusing option.
The Google Maps app on my iPhone at one point years ago switched to having a globe as its base, like Google Earth. It was great.
Then Google switched it back to Mercator. But you can scroll infinitely to the left or right, so its base is actually now “Mercator rolled into a tube.” Somehow that’s even worse!
Fortunately Google Earth is still a sphere not a cyllinder.
Well better really. It is a cylindrical projection, so it's more like "Mercator before it's unrolled".
> Mercator useful for sailing
This is the only correct answer, and everything else is unscientific nonsense. It hasn't been replaced because... it just hasn't. Mercator + knots + nautical miles is a system that is extremely useful for navigation. Since we aren't sailing ships around a whole lot anymore, a lot of teachers forget to mention the relationship between the three. I imagine that was more common knowledge back in the day.
That being said, I do like the new proposed projection for how we use maps today. I think another useful tool would simply be overlay maps.
Blame the French for reinventing the wheel instead of, say, using a 1/1000th of a nautical mile as the definition of the metre. Alas, that's all water under the bridge by now.
If you want to do navigation in SI units, the UTM projections (see sibling thread) typically do positioning in metres inside each grid square.
full circle is 400 grad, so a right angle (10,000 km) is 100 grad.
Then minutes and seconds are factors of 100, so a centesimal minute is 1 km and 1 centesimal second is 10 m.
https://www.bipm.org/en/si-base-units/metre
How is it not? it's not a change to the actual distance (well, it is for a sufficient precision), but a change to the definition of the metre is exactly what it is. It's defined relative to the speed of light rather than a random platinum bar length, with the constant picked so that the actual measurement stay the same (up to a certain level of precision).
It is also used by the military (or at least NATO). They use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_...
While most of that system is a way to tag coordinates that are "simpler" than just latitude and longitude to a position, it's underlying system is also the Mercator projection. And some properties of Mercator, e.g. that it is angle-correct. So you can use UTM e.g. in Elint for direction finding.
It's not distance or area correct, but for normal infantry this is meaningless, since this only shows on large scales, but not the slow scales of infantry.
It was adopted by the US military between WWI and WWII, and similar projections were adopted by other militaries around the same time, because earlier (non-conformal) map projections led to dramatic errors when they were used for artillery targeting.
That's like saying: we've got a bad map representation but if we ignore the edges where it's wildly inaccurate, it almost lines up with our entirely non-standard system of distances. It's multiple questionable systems locking together.
You could just draw kilometre lines on the map, you know.
The UN is a ceremonial organization that occasionally we get agreement on measurement units.
That's not what they teach in school though, and I think that genuinely is misinformation for Americans trying to understand international relations.
K12 teachers could almost get away with the one sentence: "Right is only a question among equals, for the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must."
A version of it including political borders my desktop wallpaper for a long time, until I decided to not change default wallpaper on my new devices anymore.
The word "equal" has been used in maths since centuries without any baggage at all. And since a projection (how to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat surface) is a mathematical undertaking it's perfectly fine to think in mathematical terms.
I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.
Also, this "this is loaded, let's use something else" is puny. Decades ago, "fat" was loaded. So people used "strong" --- which is IMHO blatantly wrong. But hey, people still said it derogatory, so it was burned in that context. Then it became "big". But the derogatory use stayed, so that term is now also burned in that context. And then "obese" is now used ... guess how long it takes still that word is burned, too. Seldom do people realize that they shouldn't fight the wording, but the derogatory use. But instead they attack the words. The situation stays as is, but word after word becomes taboo. How nonsensical!
Also observe how I wrote "in that context". I talked about "fat", "big" and "strong" in context of body mass. But then some SJW come and declare these words to be bad in any context. Eventually we can't fish a big fish anymore ... because some idiots hijacked the meaning of "big".
Loading up completely normal words is IMHO nonsense. In conclusion, Equal Earth is, to me, a very fine name.
> I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.
Certainly “equal” is a perfectly normal word used normally in all sorts of circumstances, including equal‐area map projections. That said, while I wouldn’t call it “baggage,” it’s impossible to separate the Equal Earth projection from the context in which it was created: the previous most notorious equal‐area projection, Gall–Peters, was heavily pushed (both when it was popularized in the 1970s and when it regained a surge of popularity in the 2010s/2020s) by promoting the idea that use of non‐equal‐area projections causes westerners to subconsciously internalize feelings of superiority over the poor oppressed Global South based on the distorted size of their home countries on a map. This idea is, shall we say, controversial and not universally accepted. But if you read the original UN resolution that was voted on, it’s clear that the UN representatives believe it (or say they believe it, anyway).
In that context, it seems absolutely clear that the name “Equal Earth” was a very intentional double entendre by the authors of the projection. I don’t fault the authors for coming up with such a catchy name, but I feel strongly it’s important to push back against the false idea that establishing use of equal‐area projections is some meaningful act of restorative social justice.
Or buy a globe FFS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections
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.
All the large continents are near the equator and hence the relative size of Africa, Australia, North/South America, Asia is not affected much by the projection. Antarctica is big too, even though wildly exaggerated by Mercator.
If anything, it makes more sense to say people don't realize how small UK/Europe is.
And I wouldn't call 29.6 <> 21.3 a little smaller, Africa is 39% bigger than North America.
Just drag South America or Australia onto Africa and tell me it changed more than a few percent in size. Barely perceptible.
North America is not 21.3 but 24.7e^6 m^3 according to google, so the ratio is 4:3. Asia to Africa is 3:2
Arable in your stats just means cultivated, it isn't a measure of the natural productivity. People in Africa work poorer lands due to necessity.
North America has more non-desert land than Africa and produces 3x as much food. Asia nearly 10x food production. Europe 2x. Antarctica has no non-desert land and Australia has very little. Asia has the most by a long way. This lines up pretty well with each continent's historical economic significance.
Regarding 'small Africa' conspiracy - I have never not been told that Africa is a huge continent. Documentaries, podcasts, TED talks, movies, Top Gear, books, atlases (they all have multiple projections btw), globes, video games. Five weeks in a balloon? I may have consumed well over 100 hours of media romanticizing the vast scale of Africa. Colonialists had no reason to conceal it either - selling big Africa investment (exploitation) opportunities was their business model
This is a Mandela effect moment for me. Or maybe it's an American education thing?
Because the resolution specifically talks about the supposed injustice Mercator has perpertrated upon Africa over the centuries, and loudly trumpets that adopting Equal Earth is an act of reparation toward Africa.
“Noting the proclamation by the African Union of 2025 as the year of “Justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations”, and decision Assembly/AU/Dec.942 (XXXIX), adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union in February 2026 in Addis Ababa, endorsing the period 2026–2035 as a decade of action dedicated to justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations,”
“Noting with satisfaction the adoption by the African Union of the Equal Earth cartographic projection, which more accurately represents the sizes of all continents, particularly Africa,”
“Convinced that correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation, understood as promoting accurate geographical knowledge, as well as historical truth, education and awareness-raising, and promotes mutual understanding among peoples,”
“Affirms that cartographic distortions of continental sizes inherited from history have cognitive, educational, cultural, geopolitical and socioeconomic impacts and constitute historical biases, the correction of which will promote recognition, justice and development, particularly with regard to the African continent;”
“Recognizes that the Mercator projection, widely used around the world, particularly distorts, from the perspective of area representation, continental masses located far from the equator, resulting in a proportional shrinkage of Africa and other regions;”
https://docs.un.org/en/A/80/L.104
Centuries of injustice!
Good god. I simply fail to understand such a choice of words.
Don't worry; Americans assume as a matter of course that England includes Scotland. Your internal political divisions are of interest only to you.
The widget also appears to include Northern Ireland, which, unlike Scotland, Americans probably wouldn't expect.