A map can squeeze the entire Earth onto a flat, two-dimensional sheet of paper, but it’s not always accurate. When you compress a huge, spherical planet onto a flat piece of wallpaper, you end up distorting many elements, such as the size and structure of the continents. So in 2018, some cartographers created a new map they called the “Equal Earth Projection Map,” which is the most accurate world map created to date. They published their study on map creation in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.
In ancient times, cartographers designed maps with images of sea monsters and golden, mead-like lakes. In 1569, a Flemish geographer and cartographer named Gerardus Mercator designed a map that became known as the “Mercator projection map,” according to IFL Science. Until the discovery of the Equal Earth map, Mercator was the primary map used everywhere. The problem with these maps, however, was scientific accuracy.
For example, the Mercator projection map shrinks the countries in the Southern Hemisphere and expands those in the Northern Hemisphere, creating a problem All That’s Interesting calls the “Greenland problem.” The result is that this map depicts Africa and Greenland as being roughly the same size, when in reality Africa is almost fourteen times larger than Greenland, according to Scientific American.
In addition to the “Greenland problem,” the Mercator map system suggests a cultural bias. As the map’s design shows, European countries appear to be more powerful, as German historian Arno Peters also believed. Following Peters’ explanation, in 2017 Boston Public Schools began abandoning the Mercator projection in order to “decolonize the public school curriculum” and switched to another map called the “Gall-Peters map.” This map also had its own inaccuracies.
While the Mercator projection map maintains the angles and shapes of land masses, it distorts the size of land masses. On the other hand, the Gall-Peters projection map maintains the size but distorts the shape of land masses. “Every world map is distorted in some way,” Matthew Edney, a professor at the University of Southern Maine, told Live Science. The new map, the Equal Earth projection map, aims to solve all of these problems. It was designed by cartographer Tom Patterson and his colleagues Bojan Šavrič and Bernhard Jenny.
“We were looking for alternative equal-area map projections for world maps, but could not find one that met all our aesthetic criteria. Therefore, the idea was born to create a new projection that is more visually appealing compared to existing equal-area projections and give it the catchy name Equal Earth,” the team explained in the article.
Its design was partly inspired by another map called the “Robinson projection map” from 1963. The accuracy of the Robinson map is known to be somewhere between the Mercator and Gall-Peters maps. It incorporates the parts of both maps that are useful and discards those that cause distortion. Patterson used this map while improving some of its features. “The Equal Earth map projection is inspired by the widely used Robinson projection, but unlike the Robinson projection, it maintains the relative size of the areas,” he said, according to IFL Science.
In addition to a visually appealing design, the team used complex mathematical equations to achieve the goal of creating the map, as they explained in a YouTube video. The first property they incorporated into their projection was “straight pole lines,” followed by “straight and unevenly spaced parallels.” They then determined the distance between the parallel and the equator. They then used the “least squares method of fitting” to model distances, developing a polynomial equation that depended solely on the powers of the parameters. Other properties they incorporated into the map were “uniform distribution of meridians across each parallel” and “equal area condition.” The resulting map preserves both the size and shape of the continents and offers far greater accuracy than any previous world map.
