Maps are weird. You look at a world map in 2d on your classroom wall or your phone screen and you think you’re seeing the planet as it actually exists. You aren’t.
Flat maps are a mathematical impossibility. It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s just geometry. You cannot take the surface of a sphere—the Earth—and flatten it onto a piece of paper or a digital screen without tearing the image or stretching it into something unrecognizable. This is the fundamental struggle of cartography. Every time you open a digital map to find a coffee shop or track a flight, you're looking at a compromise.
People get really heated about this once they realize how much their perspective has been warped. Honestly, most of us have spent our whole lives thinking Greenland is the size of Africa. It isn't. Not even close. Africa is actually about fourteen times larger than Greenland. But because of how we project the globe onto a 2d surface, the "top" and "bottom" of the map get stretched out like taffy.
The Mercator Problem and Why It Stuck
In 1569, Gerardus Mercator changed everything. He wasn't trying to trick school children into thinking Europe was massive; he was trying to help sailors navigate the oceans.
Before his projection, sailors had a nightmare of a time trying to chart a course across the sea using a flat map because the lines of constant bearing—called loxodromes—were curved. Mercator fixed this. He figured out that if you stretch the map a certain way, a sailor could draw a straight line between two points and actually get there. It was a revolutionary piece of technology for the 16th century.
But there’s a massive trade-off.
To keep those straight lines accurate for navigation, you have to sacrifice the size of landmasses. The further you get from the equator, the more distorted things become. This is why Antarctica looks like an infinite white wasteland at the bottom of many maps and why Canada looks like it could swallow South America whole. It can't. South America is nearly twice the size of Canada.
Why do we still use it? Because it fits on our phone screens.
Web Mercator is the standard for almost every major digital mapping service, including Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. It’s great for zooming in on a city street because it preserves shapes and angles locally. If you're looking for a turn-on Main Street, you want the corner to look like a 90-degree angle. Mercator does that. But as soon as you zoom out to see the whole world map in 2d, the scale goes completely out the window.
The Gall-Peters Response
In the 1970s, Arno Peters started a bit of a firestorm by promoting an "equal-area" map. He argued that the Mercator projection was eurocentric and gave a "colonialist" view of the world by making northern hemisphere countries look more powerful and imposing than they actually are.
The Gall-Peters projection represents landmasses by their actual area.
When you first see a Gall-Peters map, it looks "wrong." South America and Africa look stretched vertically, like they’ve been squeezed in a vice. People hated it at first. However, it’s a much more honest representation of how much physical space countries actually occupy. It’s why organizations like UNESCO and many Boston public schools switched to it. They wanted students to see the true scale of the global south.
Math vs. Reality: The Tissot’s Indicatrix
Cartographers use something called Tissot’s Indicatrix to prove how much a map is lying. Imagine drawing perfect circles all over a globe. When you project that globe onto a world map in 2d, those circles change.
In some projections, they turn into giant ovals. In others, they stay circles but get much bigger or smaller depending on where they are.
No 2d map can keep the circles perfect in both shape and size. It’s one or the other. Or, in the case of some compromise projections, a little bit of both are distorted to make the whole thing look "natural" to the human eye.
The Robinson and Winkel Tripel
If you remember the big, colorful maps from National Geographic, you’re likely looking at the Winkel Tripel or the Robinson projection.
Arthur Robinson created his version in 1963. He didn't use a strict mathematical formula. Instead, he basically "tapped" the map into a shape that looked right. It doesn't preserve area, and it doesn't preserve direction. It just tries to minimize the "grossness" of the distortion so that nothing looks too crazy.
In 1998, National Geographic switched from Robinson to the Winkel Tripel projection. It’s a bit more "bulbous" at the edges, but it’s widely considered one of the best balance-acts in cartography. It handles the poles better than most, though Russia still looks a bit like a long, thin pancake compared to its actual shape.
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Why 2d Maps Matter in a 3d World
You might wonder why we even bother with a world map in 2d when we have Google Earth and high-res 3d globes in our pockets.
Try folding a globe and putting it in your pocket.
Data visualization is the real answer. If you want to show a heat map of global CO2 emissions or a population density chart, you need to see the whole world at once. You can’t do that with a globe; you can only see half the planet at any given time. 2d maps are essential for "at-a-glance" data.
But this is where it gets dangerous.
If you use a Mercator projection to show population density, you are lying with data. Since the landmasses in the north are inflated, the "density" looks lower than it actually is, while tropical regions look crowded and tiny. Choosing the right projection is a moral choice for data scientists and journalists.
Modern Tech and the "Dymaxion"
Buckminster Fuller, the guy who made geodesic domes famous, came up with the Dymaxion map. He projected the world onto a 20-sided shape (an icosahedron) and then unfolded it.
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The result is a map that has no "up" or "down."
There’s no North or South at the top. It shows the Earth as one continuous island chain in a single ocean. It has almost zero distortion of landmass sizes or shapes. It’s arguably the most "accurate" world map in 2d ever made, but it’s almost impossible to use for navigation because the oceans are all chopped up. It’s a map for seeing humanity as a single, connected unit rather than a collection of separate continents.
Practical Takeaways for Using Maps
Since every map is a compromise, you have to be a smart consumer of geographical information. Don't take a flat image as gospel.
Check the scale near the equator. If you’re looking at a standard web map, remember that the scale bar at the bottom only works for the latitude you are currently looking at. If you slide the map up to Greenland, that same "100-mile" bar is actually much smaller in reality.
Use the "True Size Of" tool. There’s a great interactive site called thetruesize.com. You can drag countries around and see how they grow or shrink as they move across a Mercator projection. Dragging the Democratic Republic of Congo over Europe is a massive eye-opener—it covers almost the entire continent.
Switch to globe view for long distances. If you are planning a flight or looking at transcontinental cables, stop using a 2d map. Use a globe. A "straight line" on a 2d map is actually a curve on the Earth. This is why flights from New York to London seem to go "up" toward Greenland and back "down." They are taking the Great Circle route, which is the shortest distance on a sphere but looks like a massive detour on a flat map.
Be skeptical of "size" infographics. Whenever you see a viral image comparing the size of countries, look at the bottom to see what projection they used. If it’s Mercator, the graphic is probably junk. If they don't specify, take it with a grain of salt.
Ultimately, a world map in 2d is just a tool. You wouldn't use a hammer to turn a screw, and you shouldn't use a navigation map to judge the size of nations. The world is too big and too round to be pinned down perfectly on a flat surface, and that’s okay. We just have to remember that the map is not the territory.
To get a more accurate feel for the planet, start using digital tools that allow for an orthographic projection—basically a "virtual globe" view. When looking at global statistics, specifically seek out maps using the Mollweide or Eckert IV projections, as these prioritize equal area and give a much more honest representation of how land is distributed across the Earth.
Next time you see a flat map, find Africa and then find Greenland. If they look the same size, you're looking at a navigation tool, not a world representation. It’s time to recalibrate your brain to the actual proportions of the planet.