All articles tagged with #mercator projection
A large-scale study found that people's mental images of the world are more accurate than traditional classroom maps suggest, with most individuals' perceptions aligning closer to reality, especially when exposed to balanced map projections like Robinson, highlighting the influence of map design and education on geographic understanding.
People are confused about how one can sail from the USA to India in a straight line due to the distortions caused by the Mercator projection, a common map representation. This cylindrical map projection distorts size and shape, especially away from the equator, making straight lines on a globe appear differently on a flat map. Despite these distortions, a straight-line course from the USA to India is possible with minimal steering adjustments.
A map showing a straight line route from India to the USA has captivated social media users, despite the practical challenges posed by ocean currents and Antarctic ice sheets. The map, which appears curved on a 2D surface, is actually a straight line when drawn on a globe. The Mercator projection, commonly used in maps, distorts the shape of landmasses and makes straight lines appear curved. In 2012, a Reddit user identified an even longer straight line sea journey from Pakistan to Russia, inspiring computer scientists to develop an algorithm to find the longest possible routes on Earth.
A climate data scientist at the Met Office has created a two-dimensional representation of what the world really looks like, revealing that many countries, including Russia, Canada, and Greenland, are not nearly as big as we think. This phenomenon can be attributed to the Mercator projection, a map most commonly seen hanging in classrooms and in textbooks, which was created in 1596 to help sailors navigate the world. It gives the right shapes of land masses, but at the cost of distorting their sizes in favour of the wealthy lands to the north. Africa is actually three times the size of North America and also significantly larger than Russia, despite the opposite appearing true when looking at a map.