Map Wars: The Victory of Equal Earth Over an Unequal One
The vote passed 164-1 and backs maps that show countries’ true size, challenging the Mercator projection’s long-running distortions.
- On September 4th, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map showing countries' true sizes, aiming to correct the global view shaped by the 16th-century Mercator Projection created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator.
- Mercator maps significantly distort landmasses, showing Greenland as the same size as Africa despite Africa being 14 times larger. This projection prioritizes navigation over geographic accuracy, displacing the equator downward.
- In a resounding victory, 164 nations voted in favor of equal-area maps, with the US casting the only nay vote against the proposal seeking to display countries' true relative sizes.
- This UN decision effectively ends the 'map wars' over projections, challenging Eurocentric perspectives. Mercator maps had long served ocean navigation despite consistently misrepresenting the scale of Southern Hemisphere nations.
- Alternatives like the Gall-Peterson projection, backed by Willy Brandt's German government, and the royalty-free Hobo Dyer projection are now prioritized to ensure maps accurately reflect Earth's true surface scale.
11 Articles
11 Articles
By Angela Reyes Haczek, CNN Español “Look what little Greenland is left!”, “And Uruguay is going to disappear from the map?”, “Let’s see how much this one measures, and this one?” In an educational center in Montevideo, the most southern capital of America, the news arrived from the UN General Assembly, held more than 8,000 km away,
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CounterPunchMap Wars: The Victory of Equal Earth Over an Unequal One
Last week, on 4th September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African proposal for a new world map, which shows countries’ true size relative to one another. It aims to correct the view of the world shaped by the widely used world map based on the Mercator Projection, created by Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century [...]
The perception of world maps taught in classrooms and textbooks for centuries is fundamentally changing. The United Nations adopted a resolution correcting the size discrepancies in the 1569 Mercator design with 164 votes. The Equal Earth model, which reflects the African continent in its true size, has ushered in a new era in education and institutions.
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