Printer-friendly versionA closer look at how maps can distort the world.
Imagine peeling an orange and trying to make the peel lie flat. You couldn't do it without breaking or smushing the peel in some way.
Maps distort because they represent the curved surface of the Earth on a flat surface. This is called projection. Mapmakers have devised more than 200 different ways of projecting the Earth's surface on a flat map, but all of them distort in one way or another.
One technique is to slice the world into pieces, like the segments of an orange. The pieces are then arranged side by side and the gaps are filled in. This was the method used by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, who produced a vision of the world that lasted for several hundred years. It was the one most schoolchildren were familiar with until about 20 or so years ago.
One problem with the Mercator projection is that it places Western Europe in the center of the world and greatly exaggerates the sizes of the northern European countries. During the Age of Exploration, appearing bigger and central made Europeans feel important. But later on, some people objected to having their countries depicted as smaller (and less important) than they were. On some maps, for example, South America was shown as smaller than Greenland, though it is actually eight times as large!
In the 1960s, Arno Peters developed a way of mapping the world that kept the relative sizes of the continents to scale. Too often, he and his followers argued, the more powerful countries were depicted as bigger than they actually were, and the less powerful and poorer ones as smaller. The problem with his map, called the Peters projection, was that the continents' shapes weren't terribly accurate. Strangely elongated, they looked like reflections in a funhouse mirror.
A sinusoidal projection (referring to the math that cartographers use to calculate its proportions) keeps both the shape and the size of the continents accurate, but only by cutting the oceans into odd shapes, like leftover pieces from a jigsaw puzzle.
A different kind of distortion comes from the way we decide to orient ourselves on maps. If you think about it, the world could just as easily be depicted upside down, as in this map of South and North America. How does it change our perspective to see North America on the bottom? Does de-familiarizing the world lead us to new insights about our place within it?
