The UN challenges five centuries of cartography
not-ship.com89 points by speckx 16 hours ago
89 points by speckx 16 hours ago
Weird title. Cargography constantly challenged itself. Look at some of the possible projections at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projections
They all compromise on something to enhance something else. You simply can't map the surface of a 3d shere (approximation of the earths globe) onto a 2d flat surface.
And so we have projections galore. And anyway was (and is) always free to use whatever fits best.
I would really like to know which parts of the world use Mercator projection on their standard school wall maps.
At least in Germany (and both former East and West) it certainly isn't in use since at least the 1950s (and probably much earlier), but instead a projection type that maps land masses closer to their actual relative sizes. Mercator is extremely rare and only used in very specialized professional maps (e.g. for navigation), but certainly not as the popular map projection in education.
Also don't schools use physical globes anymore?
This whole drama sounds like it's about a century late to the party tbh.
Decades ago, when I was a child, I viewed the Mercator projection as old fashioned and stupid. In fact, I rarely saw it. Most maps were Robinson's projection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_projection). It baffles me that anyone still uses Mercator projection for any serious purpose.
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.
Yeah, that's my thoughts as well. The answer is literally in the article:
> Mercator useful for sailing
This is the only correct answer, and everything else is unscientific nonsense. It hasn't been replaced because... it just hasn't. Mercator + knots + nautical miles is a system that is extremely useful for navigation. Since we aren't sailing ships around a whole lot anymore, a lot of teachers forget to mention the relationship between the three. I imagine that was more common knowledge back in the day.
That being said, I do like the new proposed projection for how we use maps today. I think another useful tool would simply be overlay maps.
> Mercator useful for sailing+
It is also used by the military (or at least NATO). They use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Transverse_Mercator_...
While most of that system is a way to tag coordinates that are "simpler" than just latitude and longitude to a position, it's underlying system is also the Mercator projection. And some properties of Mercator, e.g. that it is angle-correct. So you can use UTM e.g. in Elint for direction finding.
It's not distance or area correct, but for normal infantry this is meaningless, since this only shows on large scales, but not the slow scales of infantry.
The transverse Mercator projection is completely different than what people are complaining about. The UTM system is roughly what you get if you only take a narrow band of the ordinary Mercator projection near the equator, but turn the globe 90°, and use the projection for a narrow strip of a specific longitude, with a different projection for each strip, overlapping at the seams.
It was adopted by the US military between WWI and WWII, and similar projections were adopted by other militaries around the same time, because earlier (non-conformal) map projections led to dramatic errors when they were used for artillery targeting.
Maybe to be more precise, conformal projections like the transverse Mercator projection and the conformal conic projection were adopted by militaries after WWI, and the UTM system per se was created during WWII.
Why not just use KM? We should reduce the number of units of measure in 2026.
If you do positioning in degrees, minutes, and seconds (or decimal minutes which I guess is more common nowadays), a 'natural' length unit for navigation is a minute of longitude, which is the original definition of the nautical mile. And then we get velocity as nautical miles per hour, or knots.
Blame the French for reinventing the wheel instead of, say, using a 1/1000th of a nautical mile as the definition of the metre. Alas, that's all water under the bridge by now.
If you want to do navigation in SI units, the UTM projections (see sibling thread) typically do positioning in metres inside each grid square.
Funnily enough the metre is defined by the globe as well: the arc from the equator to North pole is defined as 10,000 km. I think this might be where the alternative angle metrics came from, which went with the metre:
full circle is 400 grad, so a right angle (10,000 km) is 100 grad.
Then minutes and seconds are factors of 100, so a centesimal minute is 1 km and 1 centesimal second is 10 m.
Because nautical miles is an angle measurement which then happens to be 1852 meters when you break it down.
Mercator is also useful for tiled maps, which is why web Mercator is a standard. The tiles always have nice north/south and east/west bounds and there is no difference in rendering depending on longitude or latitude. For software maps the better approach, as done by Google, is just to postprocess the Mercator tiles into a sphere at rendering time if the user is zoomed out enough.
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.
I don't get why people say this / focus on Africa in this conversation. I've never thought Africa was small and was taught about the Berlin Conference, etc in school.
All the large continents are near the equator and hence the relative size of Africa, Australia, North/South America, Asia is not affected much by the projection. Antarctica is big too, even though wildly exaggerated by Mercator.
If anything, it makes more sense to say people don't realize how small UK/Europe is.
North America is very affected, Mercator makes it look as big or bigger than Africa when it's actually quite smaller.
Continents are in truesizeof btw. Asia is much bigger than Africa, North America is only a little smaller. When you account for the Sahara Desert of course, there is more usable land in North America.
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/b35... Figure 10 shows that Africa has more Arable land than North America.
And I wouldn't call 29.6 <> 21.3 a little smaller, Africa is 39% bigger than North America.
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. (-:
Honestly it's so difficult to find a map that satisfies all of one's requirements for teaching kids if you're a bit rigorous.
I might be asking bit too much but I want Antarctica to be shown correctly, I want all microstates to be shown, I want all the "(UK)" and "(FR)" mentions for overseas territories to be there, ideally Taipei to be shown as a capital, etc, and that's only what I care about, I'm sure there are dozens of other details I don't think of that are wrong on most maps.
I ended up making my own world map with d3 (that was 10 years ago, I don't know what I would use today) and print it at a print shop. I printed a dymaxion map (with ocean blue for the gaps) and another more "normal" projection though I don't actually remember which one, with Antarctica as an insert. It wasn't even expensive, and in addition I was able to put all the names in both French and Dutch.
You might assume that in Belgium, it would at least be possible to find bilingual maps but no, if you can find one that's not in English you're already lucky.
That's why I got my kids $1 inflatable globes. You can see the poles just fine.
You might get a kick out of the AuthaGraph projection, if you haven't seen it before (although Antarctica may be a smidge distorted relative to dymaxion)
Even computer maps at the time like Google Earth had distortion around the poles, as if they were pieced together in slices. So that combined with the globe caps are why I never really knew what they looked like as a kid.
The standard Dymaxion projection centers on the North Pole, which doesn’t address the whole issue of favoring the northern hemisphere.
> 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.
"I had toy globes which, unlike actual globes, covered up significant chunks of Earth, so actual globes are bad"
Solid logic, mate.
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
People say Russia, Canada and Greenland look big in the Mercator projection, but what they miss is it makes Antarctica enormous, your app shows it nicely. So much so that many maps just cut off the bottom otherwise it looks a bit silly, but then the equator isn't in the middle.
The mercator projection has neither a top nor a bottom, it extends infinitely upwards and downwards. Hence all visualizations of it cut it off at some arbitrary point. Making antarctica humorously large does nothing besides make a point.
I stopped reading at "vibe-coded".
It's kinda obvious when you see the username, isn't it?
But still, it's not a red flag in this particular example.
I never had the impression that the Mercator projection, or indeed any particular world map projection out of the dozens in common use, had any kind of official status that needed to be removed. It seems obvious to me that different map projections have different tradeoffs, and that any particular publisher of a world map can and does use whichever one makes sense for the information they're trying to convey.
I assume the UN is a major publisher of maps, often featuring them on all sorts of pamphlets, websites, and if television is to be believed that backdrop for smoke filled meetings.
It makes sense they'd have a default and this would switch it.
This was also exactly what I was taught in school when I was 10 years old. We also saw examples of other maps from other parts in the world that put their location front and center.
That this map is a derivative of "a decolonization map", should be clear to anyone that this is just political posturing and not anything of actual use.
A more interesting change would be to flip maps “upside down”.
The “north is up” convention isn’t a real thing.
I ponder whether, if the poles flipped and we survived that relatively intact, there would be a sudden enthusiasm for "South is up".
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.
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.
> European children will look at the map and feel less significant.
They might instead feel even more more "important" for achieving so much with such a small territory. I know I was somewhat shocked as a kid when I learnt that France was that small country when I had always thought for some reason that it was Greenland (vaguely the same shape I guess, and big enough to feel like it was important. It was certainly not a Mercator projection by the way, Greenland was still a reasonable size on that map on the wall in the classroom).
Instead France was just this small piece of land and it was still so important, and it felt a bit impressive.
I think the thing is people will find a way to feel significant one way or another, and maps probably aren't the main means of doing so.
Most of France is in South America
That's not true, about a third of France is in Antarctica if you want to count it, but French Guiana in South America is only a small part of France.
Its an equal area projection which means it preserves relative area.
Both kids in Europe and Africa will actually end up with a more correct idea of how large both their continents are.
Why would anyone object to reducing their inflated size to normal size if it means artificially shrunk continents can be seen at their true size?
I think the ones who got diminished did it for both idealistic and PR reasons.
I mean, if you're France or the UK, you want to keep good relationships with Africa, and probably do feel some minor guilt about colonialism. This is a vote that costs you little, so it's reasonable you'd side with it.
I'd love to hear from the folks that downvoted this carefully neutral observation.
I don't think "European children will look at the map and feel less significant" is a carefully neutral observation. It's an assumption that European children feel superiority because their country is slightly bigger.
If anything, I expect the accurate sizes set the stage for feeling superiority over their ancestors colonizing huge lands while coming from tiny countries.
If we're talking about kids, they should just get taught this type of geography using a globe. You can get an accurate (enough) inflatable globe for like 3 euros, including shipping.
Because it’s focusing purely on how big continents “look” without even mentioning the issue of actual size. That is not, in any credible sense, “carefully neutral”.
It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.
The location of the 0 longitude line has less to do with the British colonial empire as such, and more to do with the fact that the British were the first people on Earth to invent a way of measuring longitude at sea accurately (John Harrison's famous marine chronometer). Of course these are ultimately related facts - the same package of technology that allowed the British to produce people like John Harrison who were capable of innovating a marine chronometer also allowed them to produce ocean-going ships that could conquer a global maritime colonial empire (and that had a use for marine chronometers).
There was in fact a rival 0 longitude line passing through Paris, France, that the French used for many years before standardizing on the British system; although this system would equally have resulted in the 0,0 point being somewhere in the ocean west of the African coast.
In an alternate reality, the prime meridian could have been chosen to pass through Florence, making 180° and the edges of the world map pass cleanly through the Bering Strait.
For a while, France had its own prime meridian with 0 degrees passing of course through Paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian
It still does. I have one going through my house too. The problem is nobody else knows or cares about those meridians. It's quite fortunate the US didn't invent its own, what with its zeal for being different. We're quite lucky to still have just the one.
Yeah, the prime meridian selection is the actually colonial part of the Mercator map. It's not like they were trying to make Europe look big, but they were trying to make London central.
The prime meridian being the least skewed area of the equal earth and Robinson projections, with their bulgy nature, actually serves to make them both offer somewhat inconvenient depictions of places like Alaska and New Zealand and Japan.
Mercator is far more globally evenhanded in that regard, being a cylindrical projection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_meridians
The Washington meridians are four meridians that were used as prime meridians in the United States which pass through Washington, D.C.This is the source of my favorite border dispute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Tahoe#Interstate_boundary...
In summary there is a border dispute between California and Nevada, It was exacerbated by some surveying errors but the real problem appears to be the definitions of the sate borders, California was defined using one method(120 degrees longitude west of Greenwich) and Nevada was defined using another method (37 degrees longitude west of Washington) at the time it was thought these two methods were equivalent but it later turned out they are not. Congress does not have the authority to change state borders so it is up to the states to reach an agreement. and they have not. So the dispute is still technically on going.
Researching this also lead to the most hilarious passive aggressive thing I have seen in a constitution.
"All territory lying West of and adjoining the boundary line herein prescribed, which the State of California may relinquish to the Territory or State of Nevada, shall thereupon be embraced within and constitute a part of this State."
We really wanted that area east of the Sierra Nevada mountains, they would form a perfect natural boundary, but CA has already claimed it. If CA ever wants to give it up we want to make sure it is explicitly in the constitution to accept it.
Semi-related, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Times_at_the_El_Royale is a great movie.
Sounds like a decent name for a sports team - should have used that instead of Commanders.
Don't give Trump any ideas.
The Meridian of America... coming soon on a limited edition Golden Map of America.
Featuring all 244 American States!
It’s West Wing coming true again. “Give me $200 and it’s done!”
Robinson projection is a good enough, boring compromise, if the UN was interested in that.
No one needs a compromise. The world (except the US) agreed to use this new map together. It's not a conflict.
To say that "the world agreed" on something based on a General Assembly resolution is an interesting claim, if rather bold.
Is there any other way that the world could officially agree on something?
Mercator already did compromise on area and length to have "rhumb lines" (used for navigation, but also direction finding) be straight.
Other map projections (we have hundreds!) compromise on other things to improve on others. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projections
So yes, we definitely NEED compromise and not some strongman that says, due to limited knowledge "it is how it is, forever".
UNGA votes are non binding symbolic grandstanding. This vote does not mean the world agreed to it. its more like the world agreed to think about it.
Will countries actually change their map projections? That has yet to be seen. Maybe they will, maybe they won't That has yet to be seen.
The whole world thought about it and everyone except the US said “good idea!”
Well, a bunch of people on the world stage thought it would score good political points (and/or they thought opposing it would make them look bad with no upside because its a non binding vote). That doesn't mean the people who make and use maps thought it was a good idea. If anything, the fact this is coming from politicians instead of people who use/make maps is probably negative signal for it actually being adopted. If the people who actually use/make maps wanted this, they would just do it, they wouldn't wait for the UN to say something.
Representing a 3D sphere-like surface on a 2d plane definitionally requires compromise.
One can still note a poor decision based on its merits.
An equal area projection map is obviously valuable. But it's practically asinine to pick a projection that distorts land features when there are several equal area projections that do not.
Further, Ukraine had to abstain from this vote because they shoehorned in something ridiculous considering the official position of the UN members that Crimea is Ukraine [1], and Crimea is depicted as outside of Ukraine.
I have no idea if there are other hidden yet important changes, since there is hardly any commentary apart from size and shape.
[1] https://ukraine-war-analytics.com/history/international-reco...
Somebody who does not represent anybody "agreed" - not us.
Well, the underlying thinking "only people I directly voted for can do things" is wrong. I guess you never directly voted for your minister of economy, or? In many countries people don't directly vote for the prime minister, chancellor etc.
The key term some people never learned in school is "direct democracy" vs. "indirect democracy".
Even many clubs, e.g. in Germany the ADAC, have systems where people vote for an assembly (or, in politics: a parliament). And then the assembly vote fot ehri CO (or, in politics, for their chancellor). Now, it can happen that this chancellor together with 26 other head of states is a member of the Europen Council (EUCO, one of the 7 bodies of the EU, what btw most people all the time intermingle). And that this EUCO now votes on their president.
In your logic, this presidency of the EUCO is then null and void. Because not directly elected by citizens of the EU.
In my logic, I realize that this position is removed from the people, but it still done by a democratic process. A multi-stage process, but still democratic. And that it still has some bearing.
Asking for the whole world population having an election on e.g. the UN Secretary General --- under the implication that only this would give representation --- is bogus.
Oh no Mr. Schurig. I never praised "direct vote" (that would even worsen it).
I implied instead that there is a crisis in representation.
(...You could be German and you have not noticed, in spite of all the vocal effort in the North? That and all the other similar signals clearly affecting current history.)
I'm Canadian. Canada represents me. They voted on this. That's how the world works. Sometimes my government is not the one I voted for and my interests are not represented, or sometimes my interests are not the majority in my country. That's life.
No one is forcing you to use the new map, you can keep your old map. No one will arrest you for it. Enjoy!
By when is Canada going to be using the new map?
This question is nonsensical. Canada is not ONE identity. It's millions of people, hundred thousands of companies and organizations. Go and ask them individually.
Also, the UN voted to use this map for itself and suggested (!) that others should use it. It never said that everyone has to use that map. It actually said that this voting is "non-binding".
"The world" is not represented by the UN General Assembly. Did you vote for your representative?
The UN does not dictate which map you or your government or your school or Google uses.
I didn’t say it did, I said the UN is not a democratic body. He said the world decided. What is your problem?
You didn’t in fact use the word democratic at all. You used the word “represent”.
I didn't vote for a foreign minister of my country, but his job is to represent my country, including in UN. This is fine.
Here's an image I made to show the difference between Robinson and Equal Earth:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_Equal_...
Whichever you prefer, what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator.
> what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator
Are you insane? Why should one? Is it because if you see a projection you are cognitively impacted? Well, get scholarized, and you will stop getting subconscious suggestions from unintended appearances.
Meanwhile, we will prefer orthogonal axes projections for all the cases where they work well.
By the way: in the territories I know, Mercator is just one of the projections used in texts and schools.
Well, we should use Mercator for its intended purpose (only), which is to accurately show/determine angles for navigation....
I'm partial to the Goode Homolosine projection, next is whatever NatGeo standardized on. Of course, the best is an actual globe --but decent sized ones are too expensive and the beach ball ones are just not very well made.
I could’ve sworn that Robinson had already replaced Mercator by the ‘90s, so I was surprised to see defenders of the latter.
Why would the world feel the need to compromise when all UN countries, except for one agree on the projection. The solution is simply to ignore the minority, especially if it has a government that itself has always refused to compromise with others.
It's a GA resolution. Vanuatu gets the same vote as India. No actually consequential global decisions could ever be made this way, so it's no wonder it's mostly used for symbolic votes like this one.
I like the aesthetics of Robinson, but it gives you the worst of both worlds: it's neither conformal like Mercator nor equal-area for honest data visualization. It's essentially a spline fit over 38 arbitrary numbers chosen to look nice, whereas Equal Earth accomplishes true equal area with a clean, 4-coefficient polynomial.
Equal Earth is basically Robinson with a more straightforward formula and accurate areas.
Tbh, I don't see the use case for Robinson when Winkel-Tripel exists. For almost all use cases where you need a political world map, Winkel-Tripel is the better choice.
Equal earth also has its uses, it's a neat and clean map, but has more distortion in shape, which might be undesirable.
For quite a few years, and because I don't have a globe, I've turned to MapFight [0] to get a good idea of size/area comparisons for countries, significant geographic features and for historical lands/empires.
It's great they want to find a projection that better represents the real geography, but at the end of the day you're still trying to unwrap a sphere onto a rectangle. Personally I feel the schools mentioned here would get better mileage out of buying (more) old fashioned globes, and encouraging the kids to learn geography that way.
Since we are moving away from print and towards screens, shouldn't we be just using actual globes?
Yes. Specially, touch enabled screens with dynamically rendered graphics.
The Google Maps app on my iPhone at one point years ago switched to having a globe as its base, like Google Earth. It was great.
Then Google switched it back to Mercator. But you can scroll infinitely to the left or right, so its base is actually now “Mercator rolled into a tube.” Somehow that’s even worse!
Damn, I knew I've seen google maps going to globe after zooming out, but when I checked today it didn't. I wonder why they rolled that back.
Fortunately Google Earth is still a sphere not a cyllinder.
Screens are still 2D objects requiring projections.
With computer generated maps, you can just always use a minimally distorting conical or polar projection centered on the exact point you’re focusing on.
That also happens to be broadly what you would get looking straight down at the earth from above that point, which seems like it would also be the least confusing option.
yeah, but when people are free to spin and zoom the virtual globe they understand perfectly how the projection relates to the real object, which they don't when it comes to maps
Mercator is fine. Or if you want something flat use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection.
Or buy a globe FFS.
80% of the human population lives in the northern hemisphere, but closer to the equator.
have we renamed the world america yet?
Time to rename Mercator the “Map of America”.
The distortions in maps with non orthogonal axes are evident already looking at Europe (though with centering at Greenwich). So, not just the "Map of America (of the Americas)" or "Map of Australia"... The compromises are just everywhere. Of course.
(Yes, I get what you meant. I am just suggesting other angles.)
Now rotate it 90 degrees like T and O map.
What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection
The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you.
> it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter
> The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.
The UN's explicit purpose is to try and prevent conflict. One of the requirements to join is to renounce the right to use force in international relations except in self-defense.
They do that in a number of ways. One of those is to have these types of symbolic votes. The hope is that by having where everyone stands out in the open, whether on silly things or serious things, it will reduce conflict. Does it work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Obviously world peace hasn't been achieved. It probably never will be. Nonetheless, that is the goal of the UN. They want to try to fix conflicts.
>The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.
It kinda is, it also have powers to authorize invasions. Not that any of this works in practice, but that's what is for.
Trump didn't unilaterally decide what the rest of the world calls two bodies of water, only the US
He doesn't even have the power to unilaterally declare what the US calls it. Names of geographic features are established by popular usage, not governments.
>established by popular usage, not governments.
This is straight up wrong.
> I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.
> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand
Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
> Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
Precisely why, I suspect, the US voted against the change. (One of the reasons, at least) I mean, gee, I wonder why the country with the world's largest navy* would prefer maps where you can draw a line on the map between two points and it's the actual compass direction? (Give or take a bit of weirdness near the poles, where the difference between the Earth's rotational pole and its magnetic pole actually matters in a way it doesn't matter below the polar circles).
It's just a symbolic vote, of course, and nobody's navy is going to stop using the so-useful-for-maritime-navigation Mercator just because of this UN vote. But still, I would bet that factored into the reasoning. How much? Who knows, I certainly couldn't say. Except to suspect that it was a non-trivial factor.
* Largest by tonnage — China and Russia have more total ships, with the US in third place by ship count, but the US has nearly half the number of aircraft carriers in the entire world, 11 out of a total of 23, and aircraft carriers are some of the heaviest ships out there. Numbers are from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-n...
I doubt that was a factor at all. As you say, voting for this wouldn’t change the maps a navy uses anyway. Besides, navies aren’t normally using world maps, they use maps for specific regions.
The vote was because the US is an intransigent rogue state at this point, and it doesn’t want to accept any outside influence whatsoever.
> many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.
What sort of tasks besides a size measuring contest is an equal area projection good for?
Besides size, there's distance. Like it's annoying how UK and France look much further apart than they actually are, and every sea/air route appears to not take the shortest path. I'd be fine with this change if it weren't about trying to make Africa look more important. They're just fixing a misleading map.
It's worth noting that Equal Earth isn't an equidistant projection. The upper bound on distance distortion is an order of magnitude less than Mercator's though.
What's the task here?
Casually looking at a map to understand relatively how far away things are from each other
Unless your eye can casually assemble great circle routes it's hopeless on any projection except the radial one (and then only for routes emanating from one spot)
I'd bet a lot of money that Trump and all the others pushing for a U.S. "liberation" of Greenland also think it is a similar size to Africa, not 1/14th the size.
Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.
This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.
> This has clearly influenced geopolitics
Citation needed. This feels like the entire hubub from leftists about how schools use the normal map because of racism and not because its actually useful.
Of course they were lying the entire time.
For the purposes I use world maps for, correct relative sizing is the paramount thing I'm looking for in a projection. I generally use it to give me a rough idea of distances. Boggs seems inferior, at a glance I have no idea how far it is from NYC to London, for example. I feel like Mercator is similarly bad in terms of distances being uniform. What do you use maps for where Boggs is superior?
>I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.
Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.
Yeah… the US condemnations of the Axis powers is what really turned the tide, joining into the war later was really a post-script right?
Counterpoint: the Cold War was pretty much all about geopolitical symbols, e.g. the Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals.
> Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals
I'm sure the guns trained on people trying to cross the Berlin wall to the west was just a "symbol", or the nuclear tests to prove that superpowers could kill everyone, or the people who died during the space race to send someone to the Moon. Olympics, sure whatever.
Yes, a nonbinding UN resolution that does a stupid thing that no one has to care about is a symbol, just one no one cares about because its nonbinding.
To some people the Berlin Wall was an immediate and terrible factor in their lives. But to most people in the world, it was a symbol of oppression rather than a physical manifestation of it.
Except the part where had to lift an old mainframe from that frozen shithole with a helicopter under fire. And like 10 different proxy wars that are still going on.
Nazi were big on symbols. And very good in their use of them for propaganda. Yes, they played role in getting support for their project.
And allies were engaged in that too.
The UN is a body that is intended to facilitate global cooperation. This symbolic change better represents the body's members and updates an incorrect visualization, which leads to better cooperation and representation.
Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.
Happily Trump’s actions probably help global cooperation for all countries that’s aren’t the US.
It's not the most pressing issue in the world, but long-term, maps do shape conceptions about the world that we don't personally know. So it might be symbolic, but symbols are powerful.
That must be why we all live in awe and fear of giant, mighty Greenland.
The fact that Greenland looks so big and impressive in a Mercator map has probably influenced Trump's obsession with taking it on some level.
> 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.
That project was always silly really.
That the USA is turning into the number #1 rogue country is also problematic. Trump is damaging everything here.
Obligatory xkcd:
A cartographer ranked nine xkcd map projections[1]. He reverse engineered several and remade them with R.
[1] https://geospatialstuff.com/posts/2025/05/16/xkcd-bad-projec...
Oh, it's not often we get an entire category of XKCD comics: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Bad_Map_...
I'm partial to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2256:_Bad_Map_Pro...
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"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."
We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s
I think a "reversed" south-at-the-top is a good idea to at least be aware of. I don't think it makes sense to reverse it since it just flips the problem, but it is (very slightly?) unlucky for the southern hemisphere.
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Well, unfortunately it's clubs of corrupt drunkards farting in chairs all the way down to 9-member housing association. The difference is in how much power each club is allowed to have and advertise at any given moment.
Who is taking it seriously? The unipolarists clearly don't, and the multipolarists have been busy building alternatives for the past couple decades.
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A reminder of the guidelines: "Eschew flamebait. [...] Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
It's good to have political opinions. But please don't use HN as a place to try to pick a fight with people who might disagree.
Oh, this is just getting started when it comes to upsetting traditionalists. I'd wager that the majority of map-reading happens on a screen these days, using software maps that can be rotated without changing the relative orientation of the labels.
...So why is it "Sub-Saharan Africa"? Why not "Super-Saharan Africa"? "Dexterous-Saharan Africa"? "Sinister-Saharan Africa?" It's all just convention (that just happens to favor Eurocentric notions). "Free your mind." -Morpheus
and trump pooped his pants over it
Calling it Equal Earth was a bad move. The word “equal” has tons of baggage. Why not call it something less incendiary like Actual Earth or something? What ever happened to being pragmatic?
It’s been called Equal Earth since 2018. The word “equal” here (likely?) refers to the fact it’s an equal-area projection, although it could be politically charged.
That's such a weird statement.
The word "equal" has been used in maths since centuries without any baggage at all. And since a projection (how to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat surface) is a mathematical undertaking it's perfectly fine to think in mathematical terms.
I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.
Also, this "this is loaded, let's use something else" is puny. Decades ago, "fat" was loaded. So people used "strong" --- which is IMHO blatantly wrong. But hey, people still said it derogatory, so it was burned in that context. Then it became "big". But the derogatory use stayed, so that term is now also burned in that context. And then "obese" is now used ... guess how long it takes still that word is burned, too. Seldom do people realize that they shouldn't fight the wording, but the derogatory use. But instead they attack the words. The situation stays as is, but word after word becomes taboo. How nonsensical!
Also observe how I wrote "in that context". I talked about "fat", "big" and "strong" in context of body mass. But then some SJW come and declare these words to be bad in any context. Eventually we can't fish a big fish anymore ... because some idiots hijacked the meaning of "big".
Loading up completely normal words is IMHO nonsense. In conclusion, Equal Earth is, to me, a very fine name.
