Tag: Mercator

The United Nations, Mercator and Equal Earth: Another Follow-Up

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Commentary on map projections continues in the wake of the UN resolution about replacing the Mercator projection with Equal Earth. There were two pieces in the Guardian last week. This one is less about projections but about why they matter, not just in terms of diminishing Africa, but also in terms of exaggerating Greenland: would Trump have been so obsessed with it if it if it wasn’t 14 times too big on the Mercator? This piece interviews the three creators of the Equal Earth projection—it’s understandably been a busy time for them!—and provides a bit more background to those just tuning in.

My impression is that the last main redoubt of Mercator is in web maps, where the projection is not a problem unless you zoom out too much. I’ve spotted a couple of new tools to address that: see Ben Joffe’s interactive map, and MapTiler’s demo. Both deal with distortion at the map’s edges by allowing you to drag the map so that any degree of longitude can be at the centre, and transitioning to Mercator as you zoom in.

Previously: The UN Is Voting on Whether to Phase Out the Mercator Projection; The United Nations, Mercator and Equal Earth: A Follow-Up.

The United Nations, Mercator and Equal Earth: A Follow-Up

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Matthew Edney’s response to last week’s UN resolution on phasing out the Mercator projection in favour of Equal Earth: “This event and the responses to it show that we are still being haunted by Arno Peters’ damnable arguments. They were cursed when Peters publicized them, about fifty years ago, and they seem doomed to torment us even now.” See also André Ourednik’s take (in French), which points out the biases and editorial choices even in Equal Earth.

The transcript of the General Assembly debate on the resolution shows that Ukraine abstained from the vote because the Equal Earth map shows Crimea as disputed territory (which is a point about the default map, not the projection), and the United States felt the resolution trivialized the institution (which the U.S. would never do) and dismissed it as part of a “radical ideological project.”

Update: Japan’s mad about how Equal Earth depicts the Kuril Islands. Can no one understand the difference between a projection and the default map using it?

The UN Is Voting on Whether to Phase Out the Mercator Projection

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Correct the Map campaign (previously) has come to the United Nations. The Guardian:

The UN general assembly will vote on Friday on a resolution for the world to formally phase out the traditional Mercator map of the globe in favour of one that more accurately displays Africa’s size.

Robert Dussey, Togo’s foreign affairs minister, said the resolution was sponsored by Togo and backed by countries including the African Union’s 54 other member states. He did not specify the total number. […]

UN resolutions are non-enforceable but if the vote passes, it could lead to an update of classroom curriculums and everyday technology, given the wide usage of the Mercator projection in education, technology and governance.

I’m still confused about the so-called “wide usage” of the Mercator projection, given that I see so little of it myself—even Apple and Google zoom out to a globe if you have reasonably new hardware and in the latter case have globe view checked—that when I do see it (usually choropleth maps embedded on web pages) I’m kind of shocked. But I’m Western and English-speaking, I have up-to-date tech and I know where to find the good maps, and I haven’t been in a classroom in decades; I can’t rule out that Mercator is still turning up where I don’t see it.

Previously: In Case You Thought the War Against the Mercator Projection Was Over Long Ago.

Update: The resolution passed 164 to 1 with 6 absentions. The U.S. was the only country to vote against—I can’t imagine why.

Greenland, the Mercator, and You-Know-Who

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Somebody’s been talking about Greenland again, and we’re getting another flurry of articles about how Greenland’s apparent size on maps may be to blame for the obsession. Last year it was suggested that Trump wanted Greenland simply because it looked really big on the Mercator projection: Slate and Newsweek were a lot less circumspect about it than Foreign Policy was, but then they would be. The latest round of press appears to be equally circumspect. The Financial Times and Geographical magazine turn evidence of executive ignorance into some kind of teachable moment about map projections instead of saying outright: he thinks it’s bigger than it actually is, and that’s nuts. Providing some context is always good, but let’s try not to bury the lede.

Most people know the poles are exaggerated on the Mercator projection. They’ve seen other projections. In Rhumb Lines and Map Wars, Mark Monmonier pushed back against the argument that map projections distort our understanding of geography: “Do they never look at a globe, or at other maps? Are map users complete idiots?”1 It was a rhetorical question: of course they aren’t, he was saying. Apparently there’s an exception. But when the emperor has no clothes, you have to proceed as though most people run around naked.

Previously: Trump’s ‘Cartographic Compulsion’.

‘The Correct Map Does Not Exist’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Miguel García Álvarez weighs in on the Correct the Map campaign to replace the Mercator projection with Equal Earth:

I think the Equal Earth projection is an excellent compromise. But as a cartography enthusiast, it pains me deeply every time someone talks about the “true” map, the “correct” map, or that the Mercator projection is “wrong.”

I will never stop loving this scene from the West Wing of the White House, but please don’t say that any map is right or wrong simply because of the projection it uses. We should just focus on saying that some projections are more or less suitable for different purposes, but we have to avoid sensationalism.

(This is the English version; it was first posted in Spanish.)

Previously: In Case You Thought the War Against the Mercator Projection Was Over Long Ago.

In Case You Thought the War Against the Mercator Projection Was Over Long Ago

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

A new front has been opened in the never-ending war against the Mercator projection. The African Union endorses Correct the Map’s campaign to replace the Mercator projection (which diminishes the relative size of Africa) with the Equal Earth projection. I think it’s awfully interesting that they’re proposing Equal Earth instead of the Peters map: Equal Earth is a better choice for maps of the world than the Peters or the Mercator, but then so are dozens of other projections. That the campaign against the Mercator is no longer necessarily a campaign for the Peters is something to take note of. [Andrew Middleton]

Though I’m still wrapping my head around the idea that campaigning against the Mercator is still a thing. Really, still? After all, it’s been decades since the Mercator was the dominant projection on wall maps. A quick look at the catalogues of Stanfords and World of Maps suggests maybe one in ten wall maps of the world use the Mercator, and the ones that do seem to be second-tier publications at best (because it’s been known for a long time that the Mercator is shit at being a world map). I guess the Mercator is too good a metaphor for colonialism and foreign domination to let go of it.

But then I have no idea which maps are used in classrooms, in Africa or anywhere else. And I’m often surprised at how much Mercator I see in online maps and infographics, because the tools they use default to Web Mercator. Web Mercator is perfectly fine—at large scales. Most online map providers use Web Mercator at all zoom levels (Apple Maps zooms out to a globe on Apple Silicon but not on older Intel Macs, Google offers globe view as an option on desktop). Web Mercator shows up a lot where an alternative would’ve been better. So it’s not like there isn’t a point here.

Previously: The Peters Map Is Fighting the Last War.

xkcd on Greenland’s Size

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

xkcd: Greenland Size (25 Mar 2024)
Randall Munroe, “Greenland Size”, xkcd, 25 March 2024.

The 25 March 2024 xkcd honours Greenland’s place as a measure of cartographic distortion. It’s also, unexpectedly, a riff on the idea of the 1:1 scale map (cf. Borges), especially if you consult the comic’s alt text: “The Mercator projection drastically distorts the size of almost every area of land except a small ring around the North and South Poles.”

Previously: xkcd: The Greenland Special.

Mercator: Extreme

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

To follow-up on xkcd’s Madagascator cartoon (previously), I missed the fact that clicking on the cartoon at the xkcd website actually did something, but Keir caught it: it links to Drew Roos’s Mercator: Extreme, an online tool that allows you to have some fun with the Mercator projection’s excessive polar distortion by making any point on the planet the North Pole and which clearly served as Randall’s inspiration.

xkcd: The Greenland Special

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

xkcd: Bad Map Projections: The Greenland Special
Randall Munroe, “Bad Map Projection: The Greenland Special,” xkcd, 14 July 2021

At some point, xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe is going to put out a book focusing on his map-related cartoons, isn’t he. The latest in his “Bad Map Projection” series (previously: All South Americas, Time Zones, Liquid Resize) is The Greenland Special, an equal-area projection except for Greenland, which uses Mercator. And I thought he was messing with us before.

SMBC Takes the Mercator Projection into Its Own Hands

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

SMBC: Mercator
From “Mercator”, SMBC, 24 Feb 2020.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’s take on the Mercator projection is … not what you’d expect. The punch line is similar to Christopher Rowe’s short story, “Another Word for Map Is Faith”: if you can’t make the map conform to the territory, make the territory conform to the map. Since we’re dealing with the Mercator projection, this requires some … escalation.

Mapping the Canadian Election Results: Technical Details

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bothered by the widespread use of Web Mercator by Canadian news outlets to show last week’s election results, Kenneth Field has posted an article that aims to address the problem. Static maps of Canada tend to use a conic projection like the Albers or the Lambert, and that’s the case for print election maps as well. Online interactive maps, on the other hand, use off-the-shelf tools that use Web Mercator, which results in the sparsely populated territories looking even more enormous. But that doesn’t have to be the case, says Ken, who shows us, with a few examples, how use ArcGIS Pro to create interactive maps using a conical projection.

Meanwhile, Mark Gargul writes in response to Ken’s critique of his cartogram of the election results. Mark describes himself as an amateur and readily admits that other cartograms are “clearly more aesthetically pleasing. On the other hand, I was going for something different with my cartogram—specifically, to try to preserve riding-adjacency as much as possible.”

The other thing Mark was going for in his cartogram was to indicate the urban-rural split: metropolitan areas are given a black border: it’s easy to see which ridings are in Montreal or Toronto; seats that are partially urban and partially rural straddle those borders.

So it’s doing several things at once that may not be immediately apparent.

Previously: A Cartogram of Canada’s Election Results; More Canadian Election Maps.

A Map Projections Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Three things make a roundup. Here we go:

Here’s a gallery of all 68 map projections supported in ArcGIS 10.7.1 and ArcGIS Pro 2.4, from Bojan Šavrič and Melita Kennedy. Some interesting projections included here, some of which are only suitable for a specific region (such as the complex New Zealand map grid). No Gall-Peters, interestingly.

Chris Whong

Chris Whong uses a clementine as a substitute for Tissot’s indicatrix: “I found myself eating a clementine this morning, and thought it would be interesting to slice up the orange peel on an 8×8 grid to visualize how much of the earth’s surface is represented in WebMercator tiles at zoom level 3. This is kind of an inverse of the Tissot’s Indicatrix above, showing chunks of the spheroid’s surface over the projected tiles that represent them in web maps.”

Alberto Cairo’s short piece arguing that the Mercator projection isn’t a monstrosity doesn’t cover particularly new ground: the Mercator was created for a specific purpose (bearing-based navigation) and is a good choice for small-scale maps, but it has no business on a world map. But it’s probably worth reiterating, since I still see over-the-top condemnations of the projection on colonialist grounds, channeling Arno Peters (which, you know: not new).

Mercator Globes at the University of Lausanne

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The University of Lausanne has come across a pair of globes—one celestial, one terrestrial—made by Mercator in the 16th century. Mercator apparently had a reputation as a globemaker, and a number of his globes are still in existence today. But “not particularly rare” is not the same as “not particularly  interesting,” and the globes, which first turned up on campus in 2004, are now the subject of an exhibition at the Espace Arlaud in Lausanne, which runs until 15 July, and an extensive and detailed website that talks about the globes and how they were discovered and authenticated. Digital versions of each globe have also been produced: here’s the terrestrial globe; here’s the celestial globe.

All of this, by the way, is in French. If reading French is not your thing, the Harvard Map Collection also has a pair of Mercator globes, which you can view via their (rather dated) website.