The UN just dethroned the 500-year-old Mercator map
The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
In a nearly unanimous vote, the UN endorsed a resolution to promote maps that accurately reflect the true size of continents, challenging the 500-year-old Mercator projection. The decision, backed by the African Union, highlights how Mercator inflates the size of Europe and North America while shrinking the Global South. The UN's preferred alternative, Equal Earth, offers a balanced compromise between accuracy and shape distortion, marking a shift toward 'cognitive justice' in cartography.
Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation.
- saaaaaam
It’s West Wing coming true again. “Give me $200 and it’s done!”
- petermcneeley
Ya people have no idea how big Africa truly is
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.
- bawolff
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.
- andsoitis
A more interesting change would be to flip maps “upside down”.
The “north is up” convention isn’t a real thing.
- theanonymousone
I came across AuthaGraph projection some time ago and got hooked to it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuthaGraph_projection
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.
- simonw
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
- JdeBP
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. (-:
- xyzelement
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.