The United Nations has recently voted to adopt a new world map. The UN now supports the Equal Earth map which tries to represent the relative size of continents and countries more accurately.
If you compare the Equal Earth projection with the traditional Mercator projection (I’ll explain these later in the episode, don’t worry), you will notice that Africa is much larger, Greenland and Antarctica are much smaller, and some countries have shifted slightly in their position.
So, why did the UN vote to change the map? And was the old map actually wrong?
Today, we’re going to look at why our maps of the world look the way they do, why the famous Mercator projection has some major problems, what Equal Earth does differently, and whether it is actually possible to create a completely accurate map of the world.
And we will practice you English listening comprehension and learn some new vocabulary along the way!
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Vocabulary
- cartographer (n): a person who makes or studies maps
- The cartographer created a detailed map of the region.
- distort (v): to change something so that it no longer represents its original or actual form accurately
- The Mercator projection can distort the size of countries near the poles.
- preserve (v): to keep something in its original or existing form
- Some map projections preserve the shape of countries better than others.
- navigation (n): the process of planning and following a route from one place to another
- The Mercator projection was originally designed to help sailors with navigation.
- relative (adj): considered in comparison with something else
- Equal Earth shows the relative size of Africa and Europe more accurately.
- projection (n): a particular mathematical method of representing the Earth’s surface on a flat map
- Different map projections distort the Earth’s surface in different ways.
- disputed (adj): involving disagreement about who has control, ownership, or authority
- Maps can show disputed territories in different ways.
Ancient Maps
One of the oldest maps we currently have access to is the Saint-Belec Slab, which was discovered in France. It is a map of a river valley in France and is very old. It is thought to date from between 1900 BCE and 1640 BCE, so over 3,500 years old.
The oldest “world” map we know about is the Babylonian World Map, or the Imago Mundi. It is dated to the sixth century [00:04:00] BCE, and you can actually see the map in the British Museum in London. It shows the settlement of Babylon on the Euphrates River and is surrounded by different regions, including Assyria and also some mythological places that didn’t really exist. It is not a precise map in the way we know maps today, though.
Ancient Greek thinkers were some of the first people to consider ideas about the real shape and the real size of the Earth.
Hecataeus of Miletus created a world survey which included maps of Europe and Asia and also descriptions of the people living there. Eratosthenes drew a better world map using information from Alexander the Great’s campaigns. He also accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth using mathematics.
Ptolemy, a Greek mathematician and geographer who lived in the second century, was particularly [00:05:00] important in making maps. Ptolemy created a system for describing locations using latitude and longitude, and he wrote down coordinates for over 8,000 locations. We still use latitude and longitude and coordinates today.
But these early maps were obviously incomplete. The ancient Greeks didn’t know about the Americas, for example, and many parts of Africa and Asia were really poorly understood by Europeans.
Other parts of the world had their own traditions of making maps as well.
Jain and Hindu thinkers in India made cosmological world maps. These were maps that showed the world through their religious and philosophical perspective. They weren’t accurate maps of the world, but they were world maps.
The Balkhi school was a school of geography in the Islamic Golden Age about 1,000 years ago, who produced maps of the [00:06:00] Islamic world and also maps of Africa and Asia and their trade routes. The Balkhi school was particularly interesting because it based all of its maps on mathematics and travel experiences.
The Tabula Rogeriana was commissioned by the King of Sicily in the year 1154 and made by the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi and was the most advanced world map in the Middle Ages.
Chinese mapmakers used grid systems to calculate distances and also make precise maps. For example, the Da Ming Hun Yi Tu or the Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire from 1389 maps the world from Europe to Japan.
And using old Chinese maps, Korea created one of the most remarkable world maps known as the Kangnido Map. This was created in 1402 and is amazing. It is surprisingly accurate in [00:07:00] showing the geography of Europe, India, the Middle East, and Africa, considering that these areas had no contact or very little contact with Korea at the time.
From the 15th century onwards, Europeans started to travel overseas more, and their voyages overseas transformed the knowledge of the world. The Americas started to appear on European maps, and coastlines around Africa and Asia became increasingly accurate.
The Fra Mauro map from 1459 showed the discoveries of early Portuguese explorers, including the fact that the Indian Ocean was connected to other oceans, this was not known for a while, and also that Africa could be traveled around.
The Waldseemuller map from 1507 was the first map to use the name America. And in 1569, Gerardus Mercator created [00:08:00] his version of the maps, which we will discuss in detail in a few minutes.
Mapping a Round Earth
But before we talk about Mercator’s map, there is a basic problem that every world map has to deal with. The Earth is round, but a map is flat.
You can easily attempt to visualize or see this problem yourself. Grab fruit like an orange, a citrus fruit, and try to make its skin, the orange peel, into a flat sheet. You can cut the skin, you can stretch the skin, you can leave parts of it distorted, but you cannot lay the entire skin flat without changing its shape in some way.
Mapping the Earth has the same problem. You can’t make a flat map without distorting the world in some way. You have to stretch it, you have to cut it, [00:09:00] you have to leave parts of it distorted.
A map projection is the mathematical method for representing the curved surface of the Earth onto a flat surface, and every projection has to make compromises. Some maps try to preserve the shape of countries well, but they make their size slightly inaccurate. Some maps try to show the relative size of countries accurately but distort their shapes. Many maps also distort distance and distort direction.
This means that there is no flat map that exists in the world today that shows everything perfectly. To make one part of a map more accurate, you have to accept somewhere else is going to be less accurate.
Mercator Projection
The Mercator projection was created by the Flemish cartographer, mapmaker, Gerardus [00:10:00] Mercator in 1569. It is probably the world map projection, the version of the world map, that most people are familiar with. When you think of the world, you think of Mercator’s world map.
Mercator wasn’t trying to create a world map that showed the true size of every country. That was not his goal when he created a map. His main goal was navigation. He wanted to create a map that would make it easier for people to travel.
For sailors, the most important part of a map was that it could tell them which direction to travel, whether they need to travel north, east, south, or west.
However, if you make a map really accurate in terms of country shape and size, It makes it much harder to use for navigation. By making countries accurate in their size and shape, you need to distort or change the distances and the position [00:11:00] of countries slightly.
The Mercator projection, though, has a very useful property. You can draw a straight line on the map to show direction. North, South, East, and West are kept as straight lines. This makes it much easier for sailors to plan and follow routes using a compass. You just look at where you are on the map, where the place you want to go is on the map, and sail in that direction. So in this sense, Mercator is extremely useful.
But on a Mercator map, the world becomes stretched as you move towards the North and South Poles. This happens so that you can keep the straight lines, but it also means that countries and continents at high latitudes, for example, further north, appear much larger than they are in real life.
Greenland is the best example. On a Mercator map, Greenland [00:12:00] looks almost as large as Africa, but in reality, Africa is about 14 times larger than Greenland. Russia, Canada, and Northern Europe are also made to look much larger than their actual areas.
Mercator projection is not a bad map. It was designed for navigation, and it is good for navigation. The issue is that the map is also the map we use for looking at the world and learning about the world and comparing the size and place and position of different countries and continents. But this is not what Mercator was designed to do.
Equal Earth Explained
That brings us to the Equal Earth map, the map projection that the United Nations has recently adopted. Equal Earth, developed in 2018, is an equal-area projection. This means that it is designed to [00:13:00] represent the relative sizes of different areas of the Earth more accurately. The difference is particularly obvious when you look at Africa and Greenland. On Mercator, Greenland looks massive and Africa looks about the same size as Greenland. On Equal Earth, their sizes are much closer to reality. Africa is clearly much, much larger than Greenland. This is useful when we want to compare the sizes of countries and continents, or when we are trying to understand the scale of different parts of the world.
But is Equal Earth a better map than the Mercator map?
Not necessarily. Equal-earth also distorts some things. Countries don’t always have the same shapes that they have on a globe, for example, and it isn’t particularly useful for navigation, or it’s much harder to use for navigation because the lines are curved on the equal-earth map.
You can see it if you look at a map. [00:14:00] Mercator has straight lines running from north to south and east to west, but on the equal-earth map, the lines from north to south are curved, which means if you’re on a boat and you need to sail north, you have to follow a curved line on the equal-earth map, not a straight line.
No Perfect Projection
Maps aren’t necessarily good or bad. I think that’s the key point of this episode. Maps aren’t good or bad. It just depends on what you want to use the map for. If you are a sailor planning a route, you want a map designed for navigation. If you are a teacher explaining the size of Africa and Europe, you would prefer an equal area map.
Is there a way to create 100% accurate map? Well, unfortunately, not if we want a flat map of the entire world. Whenever we flatten the Earth’s surface, we have to distort something.
One way around this problem, though, is to use a globe. A globe represents the Earth’s [00:15:00] surface in three dimensions. But a globe also isn’t perfect for every purpose. It is impossible to see the entire world at once, and it also isn’t convenient to carry around with you. If you’re traveling around the world, you can’t keep a globe in your backpack.
Cartographers, mapmakers, have to make choices. Do you want to preserve area? Do you want to preserve shape? Do you want accurate distances? Do you want accurate directions?
Maps and Politics
So far, we have been talking about maps as a mathematical and geographical tool, but maps can also be political, and this is a big factor behind the UN’s decision to adopt a new map.
Maps involve choices. Someone has to decide where the borders are drawn on a map, for example, or which names are used on a map, which places are labeled, [00:16:00] and where the map is centered. And when the territory or name of a place is politically disputed, these choices can become sensitive.
One example is the sea between Japan and Korea. In Japan and most international maps, it is generally called the Sea of Japan. In South Korea, though, it is commonly called the East Sea. The name appearing on a map is influenced by the different political and historical perspectives of the mapmakers.
There are similar disagreements over places like Kashmir, Crimea, Taiwan, Israel and Palestine. Different maps can also represent borders and political status in different ways. lot of standard world maps or historical world maps tended to put Europe somewhere near the center of the map, with the Atlantic Ocean separating Europe and Africa from the Americas. But [00:17:00] there is nothing physically special about this arrangement.
And also, why is North at the top of the map? There is no scientific law saying that North has to be up. A map could just as easily place South at the top. A lot of early world maps actually, before Mercator, did put South at the top of the map. I talked about the Islamic mapmakers a thousand years ago, earlier in this episode. A lot of Islamic maps put South up and North down.
Putting europe in the center of a map or putting North at the top of a map are choices. These are choices that people have made due to history and geography, due to navigation choices or due to politics.
Maps can also affect how we imagine the world, and this brings us back to the Mercator projection. Because it makes areas near the poles, near the North Pole and South Pole, [00:18:00] look much larger, countries like Canada and Russia seem like they’re enormous, they’re massive. But countries closer to the equator, in the Americas and in Africa, appear quite a lot smaller or relatively smaller.
It has been argued that this contributes to a distorted mental image of the world, especially when the map is used in education. it makes Northern Europe, Russia, and Canada especially seem like they’re much larger than they really are, and it makes Africa and parts of South America seem smaller and less significant.
UN Decision Impact
So what does the United Nations decision to adopt a new world map actually change? Not much.
The UN resolution encourages the use of equal area map projections like Equal Earth, especially when it is important to represent the size of different parts of the world [00:19:00] accurately.
But it does not ban the Mercator projection, and it does not require people to replace their existing maps. It is, I guess, part of a discussion about how we represent the world.
Supporters of the resolution, supporters of changing the map, including many African countries, have argued that traditional maps make Africa seem smaller than it really is. So equal area projections will give people a more accurate understanding of Africa.
But Mercator is still useful for navigation. And there are also other projections out there that aren’t Mercator and aren’t Equal Earth, but have their own purposes and their own uses.
There is no perfect map of the world. Every map shows us some parts of the Earth more accurately than others.
Final Thought
Today, we have seen that there is no [00:20:00] perfect way to draw the world. The Mercator projection is useful for navigation, but it distorts the size of places near the North and South Pole. Equal Earth represents the relative size of countries and continents accurately, but it has its own distortions too.
We’ve also seen that maps aren’t neutral objects. The borders, the names, the colors, the center points, the direction of the map, all of these things reflect choices. Choices that people have made.
And perhaps the most important thing to learn from this episode is that a map is just a simplified drawing of the world. It can never be fully accurate.
What do you think? Have you seen the new Equal Earth world map? What do you think of the differences between Mercator and Equal Earth? Is your country affected by the changing of the world map? Maybe you live in Africa or in [00:21:00] the Americas and maybe where you live now seems a little bit bigger?
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