Is Mercator Projection Past Its Use By Date

Our earth is round. Globes which depict our world are round. Maps are flat. How can you ever accurately represent something which is round on a rectangle piece of paper? The answer is you just can’t. This gets us to our next question are our maps inaccurate? The answer is yes they are. All flat maps of our world are inaccurate. They are all projections from a globe to a sheet of paper with compromises to make sure it makes sense and shows relative location accurately.

Most common projection used is Mercator, it is a cylindrical projection. It first got going in 1569 and was the key for sea explorers or shall we say optimized for seafarers. Over a period of time Mercator became face of our world despite its stretching the limits, literally and figuratively, in terms of ratio and proportions of different continents and such.

Most agree that Greenland is the culprit for fall in acceptance of Mercator as most acceptable projection for a World Map.

Mercator is accurate at Equator and farther you go beyond equator the messier it gets. Visually, Greenland and Africa look almost the same size on Mercator but factually Greenland is 1/15th of Africa. Same is with Antarctica, it is almost half the size of Africa but looks almost 5 times bigger than Africa in a true Mercator projection. Most Mappers work on modified Mercator which downplays Antarctica but does nothing to Greenland.

Robinson & Miller Cylindrical are both emerging as acceptable World Maps, but Mercator still rules our world. At Mapsofworld.com we are ready to let Mercator go away from our homepage and are currently crowd sourcing opinion on change and to change to what.

At the time of doing this post scale is in favor of Miller Cylindrical but Robinson may carry the torch for all we know at this stage. We will keep you posted.