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It's the world, Jim, but not as we know it

by None (RSS feed) on Nov 10th 2004 at 8:09PM

Fans of the West Wing will be familiar with the Peters Projection Map, the geographically accurate view of our world that "freaked out" fictional White House Press Secretary CJ Craig. And to those who have never before seen the map, which is more commonly used outside the US, it is pretty freaky.

But the traditional Mercator Map most North Americans are used to badly distorts the relative size and shape of countries, and the further from the equator you look, the more distorted the depictions. Greenland, for example, probably appears on your home maps to be more or less half the size as Africa. In reality, Africa is 14 times larger.

What difference does it make? Well, first of all, if you're travelling the world, it's nice to know what that world actually looks like. Second, how we are visually taught to see a country or region has a deep effect on how we precieve that region. Organisations raising money for work in Africa, for example, prefer the Peters map because the sheer, overwhelming size of Africa on the globe — it dwarfs any other continent — helps donors to understand how vast the need is. Because it appears (accurately) to be larger, donors feel it is more important.

Fans of the world (or just of the West Wing) can order a Peters Map online from New Internationalist. And if you really want to change your world view, you can always hang it upside down.

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Michael S. Dec 18th 2005 5:01PM

Both the Wikipedia and everything2 have good entries on the Peters Projection, explaining that there are good reasons for why the Mercator projection is the standard projection. (They also counter the suggestion of Peters Projection advocates that the Mercator projection is standard for political reasons.) One advantage of the Mercator projection is that angles on the map equal angles in real life--with the Peters projection, this is only true N-S and E-W. Under the Peters projection, Africa appears to be twice as long N-S and E-W whereas in reality, the distances are about the same. So I think it's debatable whether the Peters projection shows the world as it "actually looks like" any more than the Mercator projection does.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peters_projection
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=969034

Michael S. Dec 18th 2005 5:01PM

This image of the earth from space shows how the Mercator project more accurately captures the true shape of Africa:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/uncgi/Earth?imgsize=320&opt=-l&lat=16.9583&ns=North&lon=-25.6667&ew=West&alt=147949043&img=learth.evif