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💙 Amanda
It's rare that map projections make international news. So last week was pretty exciting for cartographers. The UN endorsed a resolution to promote maps that accurately reflect the true size of continents, dethroning the 500-year-old Mercator projection in the process.
The decision, which was backed by the African Union, was nearly unanimous: 164 countries voted in favour and just a single nation opposed. (Yeah, you guessed it: a classic American Exception™️.)
"Maps shape our understanding of the world," said Togo's foreign minister Robert Dussey before the vote.
For nearly half a millennium, the Mercator map has shaped that understanding around the West — inflating its size and stature at the expense of everywhere else.
Mercator is the most-widely used projection (Google Maps uses it, for one), but it was created in 1569 during the age of exploration. It's mostly good for sea navigation. Any straight line drawn on the map represents a constant compass bearing.
Mercator: A map for sailors
But what's great for navigation isn't so great for accurate geographic representation. Distances and areas are progressively more exaggerated as they move away from the Equator. This is why Greenland looks about the size of Africa. It's actually 14 times smaller.
This disproportionately inflates the size of Europe, Russia and North America. 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.
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