Geography professor Donald Houston on why the 16th-century projection that exaggerates the western world and diminishes the size of Africa is misleading
Think of the world map and it’s likely we all imagine the same one. But that map, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, is inaccurate. It makes the western world seem bigger, diminishing the size of Africa and equatorial nations (Greenland looks as big as Africa – it’s roughly the size of Algeria), and prompting criticism that it promotes an imperialist viewpoint. So should we get a new world map? I asked Donald Houston, professor of geography at the University of Portsmouth.
Why is the internet telling me the map is a lie?
Mercator created the map on the eve of exploration for Europe, and wanted something that was useful for sea navigation. The problem is, the world is round and a map is flat. I give my first-year students an orange and ask them to peel it in one piece and lay it flat. It can’t be done – it rips and deforms. On a sphere, the longitudinal lines converge at the poles but at the equator run parallel. Mercator kept those longitudinal lines parallel throughout, prioritising the accuracy of the shape of the land. It ends up exaggerating land mass nearer the poles.
