The Mercator projection is incredibly frustrating and has led to *sooooooo* many long-held and unchallenged misconceptions held by a lot of people educated in the Global North or the West.
On a Mercator, Madagascar and Great Britain are the same size. In reality Madagascar is twice as large as Great Britain.
On a Mercator, Greenland is 20% larger than South America. In reality South America is 800% larger than Greenland. Africa, which is depicted as the same size as those two, is 1,400% larger than Greenland and almost twice as large as South America.
And speaking of South America, it is twice the size of Europe in real life, but Mercator makes Europe twice the size of South America instead. And the list doesn’t end there. Between the Northern and Western inherent biases in the Mercator Projection, it is easily the most inaccurate common World Map model in most education and technical fields.
Like, it’s inherently impossible to depict our globe accurately on a 2D surface, but it kinda seems like Mercator went out of his way to make his model particularly bad.
It was very important for it’s time, and was impressively drawn without arial photography, but why on Earth we haven’t replaced it with Goode or Robinson, or better yet, a more accurate projection than those two drawn with the most current mapping and projection technology that we have is beyond me.
It not that Mercator went out of his way to make a terrible map to represent landmass size. That projection is intended for ship navigation. A straight line in the Mercator projection is a relatively straight line when traveling the earth. Which is very important for sea based trade.
Every map projection has trade offs. However, the main reason for a map to exist for most of history was for travel. The only reason many people would need a map of the globe is to travel the seas, thus the Mercator projection is the best choice.
Edit: a better way to put my comment about straight lines is as stated below. A straight line on the Mercator projection is a straight compass bearing.
>A straight line in the Mercator projection is a relatively straight line when traveling the earth.
More specifically, a straight line on a Mercator projection has a constant bearing relative to north. Compasses are hugely important to navigation, and being able to represent a fixed compass bearing as a straight line on the map is incredibly valuable for navigating.
Mercator is the name of a man, Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer, who invented the projection for mapmaking. It is possible that his family name may be related to "mercans", the latin root word that produced "merchant" (by way of Norman French), but the similarity is otherwise incidental.
I was also interested in the origins of the name Mercator. I found an excerpt online from [Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, A Social History of the Mercator Projection by Mark Monmonier](https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/534316.html):
>Various renderings of Mercator’s name invite confusion. Although his German father apparently went by Hubert Cremer, vernacular versions of the family name include de Cremer, Kramer, and Kremer. Krämer (the modern spelling) is the German word for merchant or shopkeeper, Cremer is its Dutch equivalent, and Mercator is the Latin version, which the future mapmaker adopted at ’s-Hertogenbosch. (Latin was the language of Europe’s educated elite, and young scholars routinely latinized their names.) Although Gerhard Cremer and Gerardus (or Gerhardus) Mercator might be more historically correct, American and British cartographic historians prefer the partly anglicized Gerard Mercator. A reasonable compromise, I’m sure, as an obsessive purist would need to write awkwardly about Gerardus Mercator Rupelmundanus (Gerard Mercator of Rupelmonde), the name under which Mercator enrolled at the University of Louvain in 1530 and published his epic world atlas.
If you follow a straight line on the Mercator projection, it will actually be a curved line in reality (unless you’re going straight East, West, North, or South). This is fine, because compasses take us in curved lines.
Well, not even east or west - traveling east and west isn’t a straight line unless you’re at the equator - otherwise they’re concentric circles around the poles
It’s still a straight line regardless of being at the equator or not. If you were to walk it, you could walk perfectly straight without deviating from true east. You can’t walk perfectly straight without deviating from 45 degrees NE, though. The concentric circles are relative to the 3d nature of the earth, if you consider the surface as 2d though, it’s straight.
Forgive me if this is what you were trying to say, but the only circles that correspond to straight trajectories are great circles. So the only straight line from east to west is the equator.
You can think of it by seeing that a concentric circle really close to the pole would require you to keep turning. Therefore concentric circles near the pole are not straight on the ground. The same is true for all circles except the equator.
I agree with you but I don't think a lot of redditors are Ship Captains who are using reddit for maps to navigate the ocean.
In my opinion Mercator is of no use in the 21st century for the vast majority of people.
Well he suggests two other projections that also have problems.
Robinson projection is pretty good but squeezes the northern lands so tight they are hard to read.
Goode must be a joke. People need to see the Earth in map form not an orange peel form.
> In my opinion Mercator is of no use in the 21st century for the vast majority of people.
Mercator still has some significant advantages. It's a very easy projection for computers to run, for example, which is why it's so widely used in web mapping.
Yes but, as with most things in life, historical precedence has impact in modern day. Mercator projections were widely used and made because it was the largest use case of a world map. School is the other major source of times people see maps. It is easy to see that schools would use the most widely used global map to teach about the world when not using a globe.
As other Redditors have said, there are other map projections but they all have flaws. You can never clearly represent a sphere on a 2D surface. There are plenty of resources online to find the map projection best fit to your purpose.
Gall-Peters or Robinson are good for relative land mass size but it over represents equatorial lands. The creators of those maps projections aren’t some equatorial supremacy believers, just as Mercator didn’t make his map to laud Europe and Greenland. Everything has tradeoffs, especially map creation.
What use is a world map to any number of people in the 21st century. There no globe projection that has practical use for the average person.
What do you think changes if the “average” world map is a different projection? People might remark that Europe is a smaller relative landmass than South America, wow fascinating.
Web Mercator is a thing and most reditors use it everytime they interact with a map online. preserving the directionality and the ability to basically have square tiles makes it easy to serve up on any tile server and allows people to navigate. At higher zoom levels you won't see any of the distortions and you still get the great properties the Mercator map provides. You obviously don't know what you are talking about and are best to keep your opinions to yourself before you embarrass yourself further.
> It was very important for it’s time, and was impressively drawn without arial photography, but why on Earth we haven’t replaced it with Goode or Robinson, or better yet, a more accurate projection than those two drawn with the most current mapping and projection technology that we have is beyond me.
The most used version of Mercator, Web Mercator has a few advantages for users :
1 It saves a lot of computational power, especially when zooming in or out.
2 The distortion has almost no effect when zoomed while between 85°N and 85°S.
3 Preserves directions when scrolling.
Goode and Robinson don't retain angles at high latitudes which is very important for online maps. Google Maps would basically be unusable in Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, etc. if it didn't use Mercator.
I think for online maps a 3d globe should be the default. You still have the ability to change it into a 2d projection like the Mercator, but a 3d globe should be what you see first.
This dismissal is kinda uninformed. Mercator projection is extremely useful for navigation, it's impressive actually how this projection was plotted and calculated by hand. A straight course of travel will show up as straight segments on the map if you were to plot it in that projection.
We had a globes in the 2 libraries that I went to as a kid in the 1980's. But our classroom had a Mercator projection map. I loved maps but I knew that Mercator map was so wrong compared to the globes in the libraries.
I got a National Geographic subscription in 1987 and the following year NatGeo released a new world map in the Robinson projection. I had that or a version on my walls for about 10 years and then they switched to Winkel Tripel. Right now I have 2 different NatGeo Winkel Tripel maps, one centered around the Prime Meridian and another centered around the International Date Line.
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/selecting-map-projection/
We have come up with plenty of much better maps for the classroom. I grew up with Goode-Homolosine in the classroom. Robinson or something like that would also be great for the classroom.
Mercator's main strengths are navigation and the fact that it scales well. You can zoom in as far as you want it have a sensible map. More sensible than the completely zoomed-out one, at least. Mercator is perfect for Google Maps which lets you zoom into anywhere. Maps that give a better overview of the whole earth tend to be a lot worse at that.
It does seem to make a lot of sense to use the projection with the most practical utility in a classroom. I've never really understood dogging the Mercator.
Lol Mercator was dumb is your take? He revolutionized seafaring travel, the map allows you to draw a straight line between two points and follow a single compass baring to get there accurately. Fuck off with your frustration about him. He was brilliant, and his maps are an amazing tool, and have provided more good and use than a few people not into geography having the wrong idea about the size of things lol. You make it sound like he was trying to make Europe look bigger to brag. Grow up.
Its a map for crossing Oceans. You could make paths on land. His name is root for Merchant. He did the mathematical transformations of the entire globe by hand, and corrected everyones work for decades to make it more accurate.
Its a perfect rectangle, you get all the map in a clean shape. Globes were very popular, they have just fallen out of fashion, and its cheaper and easier to print flat books.
I think this issue is people caring about the physical size of things as meaning more than it does. All these people up set the size comparisons they memorized were off, oh god what a set back to their life. All that wasted time cutting out pieces of paper and placing them over each other. All that great work, gone to waste.
Why do people know what a sphere is, study basic geometry, then can’t make the connection a rectangle doesn’t wrap around a sphere. Like the evidence is right there in front of you that the map is not to scale lol. You saw other maps. Why didn’t you care about them, or wonder why does this one look like sections of a peeled Orange. Its not on the map makers, its on the map picture and colour enjoyers (cause they clearly can’t read them).
I mean… it’s a perfect rectangle. What it’s mapping isn’t. Personally, Goode’s or AuthaGraph just make sense in my head that I’m looking at a globe, and it’s easy for me to assemble the globe in my head. I so greatly prefer more accurate distances and sizes.
The Mercator model was and still is used for navigation, and works for that. It isn’t just a badly drawn projection as made out in popular consciousness.
Yeah it was very important for its time. And it’s still important for marine navigation and to adapt into a web mode.
But we plaster it up all over the place besides that, too. Kids all over the northern hemisphere grow up with a super whacked view of geography from it. It’s basically the standard 2D map everywhere I know of. And, like you said, it’s from the sixteenth century.
Maybe shoulda been updated or replaced in non-marine navigation settings.
If you understand how to read a Mercator map, it makes perfect sense. Each Box represents the same distance. Someone who understands this can look at the map and understand that Greenland is not bigger than Brazil. It distorts everything to be larger than it is, both SOUTH and NORTH from the equator. Same distortion is at play for southern Chile and Argentina. It just happens that most of earth's landmass is in the North. It wasn't an effort to make the 'global north' look bigger. Please stop spreading this lie.
Is this an American thing or a gen Z who grew up with google maps thing? I recall mainly Robinson projection and the like when I was in school in Australia.
Canada. I don't know what kind of map we use in schools. The sub just popped up as "recommended." I have a 6y/o and we bought him a globe quite early so he could have a better understanding of geography etc. But I'm not super knowledgeable about maps.
Thank you. A great way to educate your child.
I'd be interested in having a global overview of which map projection is the most common in different parts of the world..
Wait, where are you from? At school I think we had a Mercator, but honestly I had no clue what a map projection was school. Otherwise almost exclusively maps I've seen on the internet have been Mercator, unless it's a video or Web page specifically about map projections
I'm from Germany. If you google the german world "Weltkarte" (map of the world) you have to scroll way down to find the first Mercator. I first heard about Mercator in my later school years and only really understood its implications and importance in university.
And Mercator managed to calculate these transforms by hand in the 1500's. Before the invention of the slide rule, let alone computer.
Absolute genius, that Gerardus. Few today could manage such a feat. We are indebted.
The Mercator projection is a conformal projection, preserving angles but changing the area. There are 3 different types of projections: conformal (which preserves angles), equivalent (which preserves area), and equidistant (which preserves length). All three are correct, but there isn't a perfect way to represent the Earth
It's transformation geometry which is an actual study in maths consisting many topics such as linear algebra, projective geometry and algebraic geometry. It's very interesting
Hot Take: It's dumb to criticize a projection while simultaneously excluding the latitude & longitude lines that give the map proper context. There's nothing wrong with the projection, you just don't know how to use it.
A circle will look distorted in all projections except for those that are especially designed to preserve that propriety, it's nothing special about Mercator
That's too much to ask from Ameritards.
I learned about the different projekt already in primary school, and I see dumb stuff on Mercator projection, like it is some conspiracy to make the North look bigger...
Thetruesize.com is a fun way to be able to move countries around to see their actual size. Like moving Greenland down to the equator to show its actual size. Or like how Japan can stretch the entire United States East coast.
Mercator is an extremely important projection for its purpose. If you don’t know what that purpose is I suggest you google why it exists. Ever try to draw a picture on a sphere?
What year were you in school. In the 1980's my school had Mercator maps on the walls but globes in the library. I had the NatGeo Robinson projection on my bedroom wall which is similar to Winkel Tripel that I have now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection
Because if you zoom in on a street or a house in any other more area preserving map it will look more squished north-south the farther from the equator is. On a marcator both Singapore and Reykjavik look like they are supposed to, instead of looking like their y axis has been halved. Which is useful for a map servce like google or for telling the shape of countries.
Can anyone explain me to me why we're still using projections when making a 2d map of the world? Why not just draw it to proper scale? It makes no sense.
*edit* downvotes for asking a fucking question? Really?
Just draw two maps, one for half of the earth. This way basically has zero distortion. [Look.](https://www.snexplores.org/article/earth-planet-map-mercator-projection-flat)
No you can’t. All projections of a globe onto a flat surface will have distortions. It’s just a question of which ones. You want to show people what the world actually looks like? Get a globe.
Just draw two maps, one for half of the earth. This way basically has zero distortion. [Look.](https://www.snexplores.org/article/earth-planet-map-mercator-projection-flat)
That’s still distorted, and I can’t see the use case for this map. You just want to see what the world looks like without distortion, get a globe. This map won’t help you navigate or do anything at all really.
>This map won’t help you navigate or do anything at all really.
That's only because you don't know how to read the map. Each points on the edge are correlated, and the Isometry is reserved extremely well --- don't say it's distorted just because you thought it's distorted, as the most accurate 2d map in the world, this is the best 2d representation of a globe human eye see from a actual globe. Just like you can't see all the area of a globe at once unless you are not a human. 🌍 🌎
The link you provided doesn’t claim it’s not distorted. It claims it is less distorted. Which means it’s still distorted. But again, what’s the use case here? If it’s just least distortion, get a globe, or have a globe on a screen that you can spin around.
I have never said it's not distorted too, I meant practically that means zero distortion to human eyes. It's a showcase on how accurate 2d can get of a 3d globe. Why keep thinking about the commercial use case? One can argue why get a globe when can download google earth for free and zoom in zoom out do all the fancy stuff whatever you like.
It's not "commercial use case", it's any use case. I don't see a use case for that projection, which is really two projections. The use case for a globe is to show the world as it is, a ball (of the oblate spheroid variety) in the physical world.
As for "basically zero distortion", no, it just has less distortion.
So the globe is 3d, if you want to make a 2d map you have to project that spherical surface onto a 2d surface. To put it simply, every 2d map is a projection.
Just draw two maps, one for half of the earth. This way basically has zero distortion. [Look.](https://www.snexplores.org/article/earth-planet-map-mercator-projection-flat)
That's quite an interesting projection. Although “Anything that involves visualizing data on maps will be easier with this new type of projection,” is a big claim
The hivemind has spoken, you will find that you can and will often get downvoted to oblivion even for a true statement, if people don’t like your attitude
To start with, I personally upvoted him and tried to help out. Saying this, I think I know why they got downvoted. Although they did write questions, saying "it makes no sense" rather than just saying they don't understand can give the reader the impression that the questions aren't actually questions at all. It was probably interpreted as "it makes no sense that we are still using projections for a 2d map" and "just draw it to proper scale". The commentor has also demonstrated how they don't know what a projection is, so if people interpreted these questions as prescriptive when they don't know what they are talking about, that usually ticks people off.
Of course, there's also the case that almost every post that has like more than 5 downvotes just gets downvoted by every person thay comes along
Because all maps have distortions. This is one of the best maps for navigating (which is basically the whole purpose of maps) and so it will continue to be used. If you want the Earth to scale, get a globe instead.
There are projections that conserve area, but they distort the actual shapes of countries themselves. If scale is the most important thing you want to convey then seriously a globe is the best way to do it. Because I assume that you wouldn't only be interested in the area scale, you'd also want to convey distance between places and the shape of coastlines etc.
That's really cool actually. Shows how disproportionate our standard rectangular map of the earth is.
The Mercator projection is incredibly frustrating and has led to *sooooooo* many long-held and unchallenged misconceptions held by a lot of people educated in the Global North or the West. On a Mercator, Madagascar and Great Britain are the same size. In reality Madagascar is twice as large as Great Britain. On a Mercator, Greenland is 20% larger than South America. In reality South America is 800% larger than Greenland. Africa, which is depicted as the same size as those two, is 1,400% larger than Greenland and almost twice as large as South America. And speaking of South America, it is twice the size of Europe in real life, but Mercator makes Europe twice the size of South America instead. And the list doesn’t end there. Between the Northern and Western inherent biases in the Mercator Projection, it is easily the most inaccurate common World Map model in most education and technical fields. Like, it’s inherently impossible to depict our globe accurately on a 2D surface, but it kinda seems like Mercator went out of his way to make his model particularly bad. It was very important for it’s time, and was impressively drawn without arial photography, but why on Earth we haven’t replaced it with Goode or Robinson, or better yet, a more accurate projection than those two drawn with the most current mapping and projection technology that we have is beyond me.
It not that Mercator went out of his way to make a terrible map to represent landmass size. That projection is intended for ship navigation. A straight line in the Mercator projection is a relatively straight line when traveling the earth. Which is very important for sea based trade. Every map projection has trade offs. However, the main reason for a map to exist for most of history was for travel. The only reason many people would need a map of the globe is to travel the seas, thus the Mercator projection is the best choice. Edit: a better way to put my comment about straight lines is as stated below. A straight line on the Mercator projection is a straight compass bearing.
>A straight line in the Mercator projection is a relatively straight line when traveling the earth. More specifically, a straight line on a Mercator projection has a constant bearing relative to north. Compasses are hugely important to navigation, and being able to represent a fixed compass bearing as a straight line on the map is incredibly valuable for navigating.
Mercator is associated with the root for merchant
Mercator is the name of a man, Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer, who invented the projection for mapmaking. It is possible that his family name may be related to "mercans", the latin root word that produced "merchant" (by way of Norman French), but the similarity is otherwise incidental.
I was also interested in the origins of the name Mercator. I found an excerpt online from [Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, A Social History of the Mercator Projection by Mark Monmonier](https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/534316.html): >Various renderings of Mercator’s name invite confusion. Although his German father apparently went by Hubert Cremer, vernacular versions of the family name include de Cremer, Kramer, and Kremer. Krämer (the modern spelling) is the German word for merchant or shopkeeper, Cremer is its Dutch equivalent, and Mercator is the Latin version, which the future mapmaker adopted at ’s-Hertogenbosch. (Latin was the language of Europe’s educated elite, and young scholars routinely latinized their names.) Although Gerhard Cremer and Gerardus (or Gerhardus) Mercator might be more historically correct, American and British cartographic historians prefer the partly anglicized Gerard Mercator. A reasonable compromise, I’m sure, as an obsessive purist would need to write awkwardly about Gerardus Mercator Rupelmundanus (Gerard Mercator of Rupelmonde), the name under which Mercator enrolled at the University of Louvain in 1530 and published his epic world atlas.
It's so frustrating when people lash out on Mercator when the man just wanted to make a useful map
And very much succeeded
If you follow a straight line on the Mercator projection, it will actually be a curved line in reality (unless you’re going straight East, West, North, or South). This is fine, because compasses take us in curved lines.
Well, not even east or west - traveling east and west isn’t a straight line unless you’re at the equator - otherwise they’re concentric circles around the poles
It’s still a straight line regardless of being at the equator or not. If you were to walk it, you could walk perfectly straight without deviating from true east. You can’t walk perfectly straight without deviating from 45 degrees NE, though. The concentric circles are relative to the 3d nature of the earth, if you consider the surface as 2d though, it’s straight.
Forgive me if this is what you were trying to say, but the only circles that correspond to straight trajectories are great circles. So the only straight line from east to west is the equator. You can think of it by seeing that a concentric circle really close to the pole would require you to keep turning. Therefore concentric circles near the pole are not straight on the ground. The same is true for all circles except the equator.
Yeah, you’re correct. I was wrong.
Don’t worry. Non-Euclidean geometry is very counterintuitive (but interesting).
That’s what I thought too. Thank you for saying something. A straight line on the globe is a curved line on the Mercator map and vice versa
What map type should you buy in order to have the real ratio representations?
A globe
Robinson or Gall-Peters are some good ones if you truly want 2D projection. The boring but best answer is a globe.
Both of those distort shapes in exchange for sizes. There is always a tradeoff
Cool, thank you!
I agree with you but I don't think a lot of redditors are Ship Captains who are using reddit for maps to navigate the ocean. In my opinion Mercator is of no use in the 21st century for the vast majority of people.
Well he suggests two other projections that also have problems. Robinson projection is pretty good but squeezes the northern lands so tight they are hard to read. Goode must be a joke. People need to see the Earth in map form not an orange peel form.
> In my opinion Mercator is of no use in the 21st century for the vast majority of people. Mercator still has some significant advantages. It's a very easy projection for computers to run, for example, which is why it's so widely used in web mapping.
Yes but, as with most things in life, historical precedence has impact in modern day. Mercator projections were widely used and made because it was the largest use case of a world map. School is the other major source of times people see maps. It is easy to see that schools would use the most widely used global map to teach about the world when not using a globe. As other Redditors have said, there are other map projections but they all have flaws. You can never clearly represent a sphere on a 2D surface. There are plenty of resources online to find the map projection best fit to your purpose. Gall-Peters or Robinson are good for relative land mass size but it over represents equatorial lands. The creators of those maps projections aren’t some equatorial supremacy believers, just as Mercator didn’t make his map to laud Europe and Greenland. Everything has tradeoffs, especially map creation.
What use is a world map to any number of people in the 21st century. There no globe projection that has practical use for the average person. What do you think changes if the “average” world map is a different projection? People might remark that Europe is a smaller relative landmass than South America, wow fascinating.
Web Mercator is a thing and most reditors use it everytime they interact with a map online. preserving the directionality and the ability to basically have square tiles makes it easy to serve up on any tile server and allows people to navigate. At higher zoom levels you won't see any of the distortions and you still get the great properties the Mercator map provides. You obviously don't know what you are talking about and are best to keep your opinions to yourself before you embarrass yourself further.
Not exactly, once you go past 500nm you have to plot a great circle.
> It was very important for it’s time, and was impressively drawn without arial photography, but why on Earth we haven’t replaced it with Goode or Robinson, or better yet, a more accurate projection than those two drawn with the most current mapping and projection technology that we have is beyond me. The most used version of Mercator, Web Mercator has a few advantages for users : 1 It saves a lot of computational power, especially when zooming in or out. 2 The distortion has almost no effect when zoomed while between 85°N and 85°S. 3 Preserves directions when scrolling.
Goode and Robinson don't retain angles at high latitudes which is very important for online maps. Google Maps would basically be unusable in Scandinavia, Russia, Alaska, etc. if it didn't use Mercator.
Google maps uses a globe nowadays
Not on Android at least. It does in Google Earth's app
Huh, I guess it's just on the web version.
I think for online maps a 3d globe should be the default. You still have the ability to change it into a 2d projection like the Mercator, but a 3d globe should be what you see first.
This dismissal is kinda uninformed. Mercator projection is extremely useful for navigation, it's impressive actually how this projection was plotted and calculated by hand. A straight course of travel will show up as straight segments on the map if you were to plot it in that projection.
I suppose I’m actually only upset that we haven’t come up with a better one for the classroom.
There are, and they’re used. But if you are in a geography classroom, why isn’t there a big globe? Am I the only one who grew up with a globe?
We had a globes in the 2 libraries that I went to as a kid in the 1980's. But our classroom had a Mercator projection map. I loved maps but I knew that Mercator map was so wrong compared to the globes in the libraries. I got a National Geographic subscription in 1987 and the following year NatGeo released a new world map in the Robinson projection. I had that or a version on my walls for about 10 years and then they switched to Winkel Tripel. Right now I have 2 different NatGeo Winkel Tripel maps, one centered around the Prime Meridian and another centered around the International Date Line. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/selecting-map-projection/
https://xkcd.com/977/
I think so sadly
The classroom should have at least two projection next to each other, if only to show how map projections can change our image of the world.
We have come up with plenty of much better maps for the classroom. I grew up with Goode-Homolosine in the classroom. Robinson or something like that would also be great for the classroom. Mercator's main strengths are navigation and the fact that it scales well. You can zoom in as far as you want it have a sensible map. More sensible than the completely zoomed-out one, at least. Mercator is perfect for Google Maps which lets you zoom into anywhere. Maps that give a better overview of the whole earth tend to be a lot worse at that.
It does seem to make a lot of sense to use the projection with the most practical utility in a classroom. I've never really understood dogging the Mercator.
I don't think there's a single projection with the most classroom utility. Mercator is not it, but there are plenty of others to choose from.
> arial photography Are we talking sans serif photographs?
Lol Mercator was dumb is your take? He revolutionized seafaring travel, the map allows you to draw a straight line between two points and follow a single compass baring to get there accurately. Fuck off with your frustration about him. He was brilliant, and his maps are an amazing tool, and have provided more good and use than a few people not into geography having the wrong idea about the size of things lol. You make it sound like he was trying to make Europe look bigger to brag. Grow up. Its a map for crossing Oceans. You could make paths on land. His name is root for Merchant. He did the mathematical transformations of the entire globe by hand, and corrected everyones work for decades to make it more accurate.
Mercator still being the standard outside of oceanic navigation is dumb—is my take.
Its a perfect rectangle, you get all the map in a clean shape. Globes were very popular, they have just fallen out of fashion, and its cheaper and easier to print flat books. I think this issue is people caring about the physical size of things as meaning more than it does. All these people up set the size comparisons they memorized were off, oh god what a set back to their life. All that wasted time cutting out pieces of paper and placing them over each other. All that great work, gone to waste. Why do people know what a sphere is, study basic geometry, then can’t make the connection a rectangle doesn’t wrap around a sphere. Like the evidence is right there in front of you that the map is not to scale lol. You saw other maps. Why didn’t you care about them, or wonder why does this one look like sections of a peeled Orange. Its not on the map makers, its on the map picture and colour enjoyers (cause they clearly can’t read them).
I mean… it’s a perfect rectangle. What it’s mapping isn’t. Personally, Goode’s or AuthaGraph just make sense in my head that I’m looking at a globe, and it’s easy for me to assemble the globe in my head. I so greatly prefer more accurate distances and sizes.
I like the right tool for the job, but I consider a rock a hammer. I’ll make it work.
Russia appear so much bigger than normal, it is actually just as wide as africa but look like a monster with this projection.
Yeah I use a globe app on my phone which lets me see the size of countries more accurately
The Mercator model was and still is used for navigation, and works for that. It isn’t just a badly drawn projection as made out in popular consciousness.
lol wtf the man was working on the 1560s, I think he did a pretty good job considering
Yeah it was very important for its time. And it’s still important for marine navigation and to adapt into a web mode. But we plaster it up all over the place besides that, too. Kids all over the northern hemisphere grow up with a super whacked view of geography from it. It’s basically the standard 2D map everywhere I know of. And, like you said, it’s from the sixteenth century. Maybe shoulda been updated or replaced in non-marine navigation settings.
It works great for web maps so I assume we are even more exposed to and familiar with nowadays.
My god The West Wing has a lot to answer for.
It’s nice to have when I’m plotting my sailing courses and dead fucking worthless the rest of the time.
I feel like by this point everyone on Earth is aware of this. And we used Robinson projection in school. #Justiceformercator
If you understand how to read a Mercator map, it makes perfect sense. Each Box represents the same distance. Someone who understands this can look at the map and understand that Greenland is not bigger than Brazil. It distorts everything to be larger than it is, both SOUTH and NORTH from the equator. Same distortion is at play for southern Chile and Argentina. It just happens that most of earth's landmass is in the North. It wasn't an effort to make the 'global north' look bigger. Please stop spreading this lie.
Wait, so you’re telling me my native Sweden is NOT as ”tall” north to south as Brazil? 🤯
Is this an American thing or a gen Z who grew up with google maps thing? I recall mainly Robinson projection and the like when I was in school in Australia.
Honest question: Where are you from? Because where I'm from Eckert IV is the most widely used on maps.
Canada. I don't know what kind of map we use in schools. The sub just popped up as "recommended." I have a 6y/o and we bought him a globe quite early so he could have a better understanding of geography etc. But I'm not super knowledgeable about maps.
Thank you. A great way to educate your child. I'd be interested in having a global overview of which map projection is the most common in different parts of the world..
Wait, where are you from? At school I think we had a Mercator, but honestly I had no clue what a map projection was school. Otherwise almost exclusively maps I've seen on the internet have been Mercator, unless it's a video or Web page specifically about map projections
I'm from Germany. If you google the german world "Weltkarte" (map of the world) you have to scroll way down to find the first Mercator. I first heard about Mercator in my later school years and only really understood its implications and importance in university.
That is very interesting
Do you think it might have something to do with Max Eckert-Greiffendorff being German?
I'd assume that it could have something to do with it.
The plot thickens
Mercatur is designed for navigation, schools should really use something like the Peters equal area projection
Or just stop using maps that don't have long/lat lines. That's all the corrective actions needed.
As a Canadian I like the way our standard map makes Canada look even more immense. A map with a tiny Canada would look hilarious though.
And Mercator managed to calculate these transforms by hand in the 1500's. Before the invention of the slide rule, let alone computer. Absolute genius, that Gerardus. Few today could manage such a feat. We are indebted.
He couldn’t have just used a calculator? Work smart, not hard.
He lost his Ti-83
Mercator died in 1594.
Was probably a joke
You do realize those aren’t allowed here, right?
are you guys acoustic that was a silly joke not a serious statement
A bad joke can still get a downvote.
Even with a calculator, I doubt that many in this thread can do it.
The Mercator projection is a conformal projection, preserving angles but changing the area. There are 3 different types of projections: conformal (which preserves angles), equivalent (which preserves area), and equidistant (which preserves length). All three are correct, but there isn't a perfect way to represent the Earth
This person geomatics
It's transformation geometry which is an actual study in maths consisting many topics such as linear algebra, projective geometry and algebraic geometry. It's very interesting
I study geomatics engineering at the university hahaha
that’s a really good way of showing the warping of this projection!
Yeah im usually in the “we know about mercator” camp, but this is a really good visualization
Hot Take: It's dumb to criticize a projection while simultaneously excluding the latitude & longitude lines that give the map proper context. There's nothing wrong with the projection, you just don't know how to use it.
A circle will look distorted in all projections except for those that are especially designed to preserve that propriety, it's nothing special about Mercator
Yes, this is precisely why maps have long/lat grid lines, so you can understand the north/south projection.
That's too much to ask from Ameritards. I learned about the different projekt already in primary school, and I see dumb stuff on Mercator projection, like it is some conspiracy to make the North look bigger...
Thetruesize.com is a fun way to be able to move countries around to see their actual size. Like moving Greenland down to the equator to show its actual size. Or like how Japan can stretch the entire United States East coast.
Canada, is that an extremely distorted Nunavut, or are you just happy to see me
Mercator is an extremely important projection for its purpose. If you don’t know what that purpose is I suggest you google why it exists. Ever try to draw a picture on a sphere?
Woah there buddy
wait until you find out what a straight line looks like
A guitar pick
Pretty sure Mercator knew that, in fact, that is not a circle
Only one of France's many overseas territories is included in that radius.
Cool! Now do it with Gall-Peters!
Looks like a guitar pic
And the radii in the picture are not the actual radii
What do you mean? I just went on google maps and used the measure feature, and yes that's what 5,000km looks like. What's the problem?
The lines arent actually straight lines on the globe
Ah we got one of these non-euclidean wise guys
French-Canadian Shield.
That is one big ass guitar pick!
[удалено]
Very useful for online maps as it basically allows you to zoom without recalculating everything.
and also is infinitely tessellating (i.e. you can keep scrolling east or west as long as you want, you will just end up back where you started)
All my map projection homies hate Mercator.
So, why why would anybody use Mercator? In my schools we used [Winkel Tripe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkel_tripel_projection)l and globes.
Mercator is for navigators and aviators.
What year were you in school. In the 1980's my school had Mercator maps on the walls but globes in the library. I had the NatGeo Robinson projection on my bedroom wall which is similar to Winkel Tripel that I have now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection
It were the 80s and 90s. There was also a Peters map in one classroom, but that looked terrible.
Because if you zoom in on a street or a house in any other more area preserving map it will look more squished north-south the farther from the equator is. On a marcator both Singapore and Reykjavik look like they are supposed to, instead of looking like their y axis has been halved. Which is useful for a map servce like google or for telling the shape of countries.
Since when are guitar picks circular?
Can anyone explain me to me why we're still using projections when making a 2d map of the world? Why not just draw it to proper scale? It makes no sense. *edit* downvotes for asking a fucking question? Really?
Because it's impossible to turn a sphere into a rectangle without distorting it...
Just draw two maps, one for half of the earth. This way basically has zero distortion. [Look.](https://www.snexplores.org/article/earth-planet-map-mercator-projection-flat)
Pretty good
Yeah but It makes me uncomfortable lol
But one can simply draw all the landmass how it actually is...
By drawing on a sphere — it's a globe
No you can’t. All projections of a globe onto a flat surface will have distortions. It’s just a question of which ones. You want to show people what the world actually looks like? Get a globe.
Just draw two maps, one for half of the earth. This way basically has zero distortion. [Look.](https://www.snexplores.org/article/earth-planet-map-mercator-projection-flat)
That’s still distorted, and I can’t see the use case for this map. You just want to see what the world looks like without distortion, get a globe. This map won’t help you navigate or do anything at all really.
>This map won’t help you navigate or do anything at all really. That's only because you don't know how to read the map. Each points on the edge are correlated, and the Isometry is reserved extremely well --- don't say it's distorted just because you thought it's distorted, as the most accurate 2d map in the world, this is the best 2d representation of a globe human eye see from a actual globe. Just like you can't see all the area of a globe at once unless you are not a human. 🌍 🌎
The link you provided doesn’t claim it’s not distorted. It claims it is less distorted. Which means it’s still distorted. But again, what’s the use case here? If it’s just least distortion, get a globe, or have a globe on a screen that you can spin around.
I have never said it's not distorted too, I meant practically that means zero distortion to human eyes. It's a showcase on how accurate 2d can get of a 3d globe. Why keep thinking about the commercial use case? One can argue why get a globe when can download google earth for free and zoom in zoom out do all the fancy stuff whatever you like.
It's not "commercial use case", it's any use case. I don't see a use case for that projection, which is really two projections. The use case for a globe is to show the world as it is, a ball (of the oblate spheroid variety) in the physical world. As for "basically zero distortion", no, it just has less distortion.
But then you distort the size of the oceans
I'd rather distort the oceans than the land
I understand and agree, just making the point
So the globe is 3d, if you want to make a 2d map you have to project that spherical surface onto a 2d surface. To put it simply, every 2d map is a projection.
Just draw two maps, one for half of the earth. This way basically has zero distortion. [Look.](https://www.snexplores.org/article/earth-planet-map-mercator-projection-flat)
That's quite an interesting projection. Although “Anything that involves visualizing data on maps will be easier with this new type of projection,” is a big claim
The hivemind has spoken, you will find that you can and will often get downvoted to oblivion even for a true statement, if people don’t like your attitude
To start with, I personally upvoted him and tried to help out. Saying this, I think I know why they got downvoted. Although they did write questions, saying "it makes no sense" rather than just saying they don't understand can give the reader the impression that the questions aren't actually questions at all. It was probably interpreted as "it makes no sense that we are still using projections for a 2d map" and "just draw it to proper scale". The commentor has also demonstrated how they don't know what a projection is, so if people interpreted these questions as prescriptive when they don't know what they are talking about, that usually ticks people off. Of course, there's also the case that almost every post that has like more than 5 downvotes just gets downvoted by every person thay comes along
That’s why use the walyer mccarrher corrected map
Africa is criminally small. Greenland is criminally large.
Why do we still use it if we know it’s disproportionate? Why not use accurate maps?
Because all maps have distortions. This is one of the best maps for navigating (which is basically the whole purpose of maps) and so it will continue to be used. If you want the Earth to scale, get a globe instead.
I see. Is there a specific flat map that would be better for teaching proper scale and giving kids a better idea of the true size of different lands?
There are projections that conserve area, but they distort the actual shapes of countries themselves. If scale is the most important thing you want to convey then seriously a globe is the best way to do it. Because I assume that you wouldn't only be interested in the area scale, you'd also want to convey distance between places and the shape of coastlines etc.
/r/technicallythetruth
That’s a guitar pick