Introduction

There is no way to properly and fully display the contents of a sphere on a flat plane – it is just not possible without distorting the image. This applies to the Earth and its maps. The Earth is a sphere (though there are some bits that bulge out) and thus the image upon a globe cannot be represented truly on a map. So, people use what are called ‘projections,’ the most infamous of which is the Mercator Projection, which shows countries as larger than they are the closer they are to the North or South Pole. In fact, this map is so very distorted that Greenland appears to be a size comparable to the entire continent of Africa, despite Greenland being around 14 times smaller than Africa!

History of the Mercator Projection

The Mercator Projection was invented in 1569 by the Flemish geographer Gerhard Kremer (he went by Gerardus Mercator) as a map meant for navigation. Various evidence points to the theory that Mercator was aided in his creation of the map by Portuguese mathematician and cosmographer Pedro Nunes through his introduction of a similar idea in 1537 (Nunes and Mercator were friends, so that explains part of it). Either way, the map was meant to make it easier for sailors to find their way, not to accurately represent the world as a whole. 

In the mid-18th century, navigation technology caught up to Mercator and his projection became widely used, although, this was after Mercator’s death. Furthermore, in the 19th century, the map became even more widely used – it began to be the standard projection for commercial and educational maps. Publishers soon realized that the map was inaccurate and scaled in a way to represent distance, not size, and thus criticism of the map grew. Despite this, the map surged in popularity in the 20th century through the beginning of the internet as the Web Mercator Projection. Google Maps’ adoption of the projection in 2005 spread the usage of it throughout the internet until it became the standard for online mapping. Nowadays, many companies, including Google Maps, have ceased using the inaccurate projection.

Criticism

If you look at a globe and then at a Mercator map, you’ll find many differences. The Mercator Projection was made at a time when prioritizing Europe was the norm, so the ways that the map made European countries look much larger than they were was no problem for publishers when it was originally used. But when publishers wanted maps that weren’t for navigation purposes (keep in mind that European navigation was the only thing in mind when Mercator and Nunes made the projection) and showed countries and areas accurately, most people began to take issue with the Mercator Projection. Colonial bias was cited as the main reason as to why countries closer to the equator were smaller than they should’ve been. 

A 1973 conference held by Arno Peters saw him introducing this concept to the Press and calling the map discriminatory. Instead, he opted for his own projection – the Peters Projection (which was actually invented by James Gall in 1855, hence why many call it the Gall-Peters Projection). This map itself had a bias towards countries closer to the equator, which happened to be mostly developing countries at the time. Charitable organizations were quick to endorse the newly publicized map because of how it favored equatorial countries, especially since many of them operated in those areas.

Modern-day alternatives to the Mercator Projection (which is still widely used) include the Peters Projection, the Robinson Projection, the Equal Earth Projection, and the Lambert cylindrical equal-area Projection.