World Maps

“A road map always tells you everything except how to refold it”- anon

What’s the “best” way to flatten a globe into a map? This question has haunted Cartographers (map makers) for centuries. The worldview most of us have grown up with is called the Mercator projection from 1569. It has conformal properties that make it perfect for sea voyages by preserving scale and angles for small regions. However there are large distortions near the poles. Greenland and Antarctica are inflated. So are Canada and Russia, making the northern hemisphere continents appear much bigger than the southern.

A different map, the Gall-Peters projection is popular with scholars but not a big seller with the public. James Gall proposed the idea in 1855 of a map which preserves the true size of continents at the expense of their shape. In 1973 Arno Peters created a new version of this projection and popularized the idea that this map corrected for northern bias and displayed the true size of Africa and South America. North America and Europe look so tiny on this map (and rightly so).

The "Dymaxion Map" was created by architect Buckminster Fuller over the years 1927-1954. This map preserves the shape AND size of the continents by cleverly cutting across the oceans. The image shown here uses hundreds of images acquired from the NOAA weather satellites to fill in the continents. Notice how small Greenland is here. (Don't confuse it with the much bigger Arctic ice sheet right next to it!)

Bottom Line

Why bring this up now? Because there is a series of new world maps that look great. See the video Clever folds in a globe give new perspectives on Earth. The "Myriahedral projection" was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. His algorithm divides the globe's surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares. Earlier map makers have used this technique with a few dozen polygons (like the "Dymaxion” map above.) van Wijk uses thousands of polygons and a computer to calculate thousands of cut lines based upon parameters like “preserve the continents” or “separate the continents from the ocean as far as possible”. The image shown here was weighted for “preserve the oceans”.