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US angry US no big

US biggest! US #1!

I don't think this is a US only thing. Even in India, where I'm from, everyone I've spoken to or know tends to like this change.

The article actually maps out the history pretty well. This is basically a recrudescence of the Gall-Peters debate from the 70s, triggered by Boston Public Schools adopting Gall-Peters in 2017. The current wave has taken up the old fight with a less-ugly equiareal map.

This was also exactly what I was taught in school when I was 10 years old. We also saw examples of other maps from other parts in the world that put their location front and center.

That this map is a derivative of "a decolonization map", should be clear to anyone that this is just political posturing and not anything of actual use.

I assume the UN is a major publisher of maps, often featuring them on all sorts of pamphlets, websites, and if television is to be believed that backdrop for smoke filled meetings.

It makes sense they'd have a default and this would switch it.

Yeah, that's my thoughts as well. The answer is literally in the article:

> Mercator useful for sailing

This is the only correct answer, and everything else is unscientific nonsense. It hasn't been replaced because... it just hasn't. Mercator + knots + nautical miles is a system that is extremely useful for navigation. Since we aren't sailing ships around a whole lot anymore, a lot of teachers forget to mention the relationship between the three. I imagine that was more common knowledge back in the day.

That being said, I do like the new proposed projection for how we use maps today. I think another useful tool would simply be overlay maps.

Yep.

The UN is a ceremonial organization that occasionally we get agreement on measurement units.

That's not what they teach in school though, and I think that genuinely is misinformation for Americans trying to understand international relations.

K12 teachers could almost get away with the one sentence: "Right is only a question among equals, for the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as they must."

Honestly it's so difficult to find a map that satisfies all of one's requirements for teaching kids if you're a bit rigorous.

I might be asking bit too much but I want Antarctica to be shown correctly, I want all microstates to be shown, I want all the "(UK)" and "(FR)" mentions for overseas territories to be there, ideally Taipei to be shown as a capital, etc, and that's only what I care about, I'm sure there are dozens of other details I don't think of that are wrong on most maps.

I ended up making my own world map with d3 (that was 10 years ago, I don't know what I would use today) and print it at a print shop. I printed a dymaxion map (with ocean blue for the gaps) and another more "normal" projection though I don't actually remember which one, with Antarctica as an insert. It wasn't even expensive, and in addition I was able to put all the names in both French and Dutch.

You might assume that in Belgium, it would at least be possible to find bilingual maps but no, if you can find one that's not in English you're already lucky.

I really like oblique projections. Have you seen this neat one from Kerkovits - A Low-Distortion Oblique Map Projection of the World’s Landmasses (2024)?

https://files.catbox.moe/k11gqq.avif

That's why I got my kids $1 inflatable globes. You can see the poles just fine.

You might get a kick out of the AuthaGraph projection, if you haven't seen it before (although Antarctica may be a smidge distorted relative to dymaxion)

Even computer maps at the time like Google Earth had distortion around the poles, as if they were pieced together in slices. So that combined with the globe caps are why I never really knew what they looked like as a kid.

The standard Dymaxion projection centers on the North Pole, which doesn’t address the whole issue of favoring the northern hemisphere.

> Interestingly, to counter the people who say that the best thing to learn from is an actual globe, a couple of children's globes of the world that I had as a child had large metal caps around the axle that obscured most of Antarctica.

"I had toy globes which, unlike actual globes, covered up significant chunks of Earth, so actual globes are bad"

Solid logic, mate.

I don't get why people say this / focus on Africa in this conversation. I've never thought Africa was small and was taught about the Berlin Conference, etc in school.

All the large continents are near the equator and hence the relative size of Africa, Australia, North/South America, Asia is not affected much by the projection. Antarctica is big too, even though wildly exaggerated by Mercator.

If anything, it makes more sense to say people don't realize how small UK/Europe is.

I would expect that most people have seen a globe at least once in their life though? ;)

> Note of course this includes Scotland!

Don't worry; Americans assume as a matter of course that England includes Scotland. Your internal political divisions are of interest only to you.

The widget also appears to include Northern Ireland, which, unlike Scotland, Americans probably wouldn't expect.

And northern Ireland

And people have no idea how diverse the cultures in Africa are.

People say Russia, Canada and Greenland look big in the Mercator projection, but what they miss is it makes Antarctica enormous, your app shows it nicely. So much so that many maps just cut off the bottom otherwise it looks a bit silly, but then the equator isn't in the middle.

Very cool, Its interesting to see what happens to Antarctica.

Very nice!

I stopped reading at "vibe-coded".

Yeah -- I remember in old (1960s) TV shows and movies the headquarters of organizations would always have a map like that, often huge on one wall. It makes sense -- why not just peel the Earth like an orange and flatten it out?

The location of the 0 longitude line has less to do with the British colonial empire as such, and more to do with the fact that the British were the first people on Earth to invent a way of measuring longitude at sea accurately (John Harrison's famous marine chronometer). Of course these are ultimately related facts - the same package of technology that allowed the British to produce people like John Harrison who were capable of innovating a marine chronometer also allowed them to produce ocean-going ships that could conquer a global maritime colonial empire (and that had a use for marine chronometers).

There was in fact a rival 0 longitude line passing through Paris, France, that the French used for many years before standardizing on the British system; although this system would equally have resulted in the 0,0 point being somewhere in the ocean west of the African coast.

In an alternate reality, the prime meridian could have been chosen to pass through Florence, making 180° and the edges of the world map pass cleanly through the Bering Strait.

For a while, France had its own prime meridian with 0 degrees passing of course through Paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian

Yeah, the prime meridian selection is the actually colonial part of the Mercator map. It's not like they were trying to make Europe look big, but they were trying to make London central.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_meridians

  The Washington meridians are four meridians that were used as prime meridians in the United States which pass through Washington, D.C.

No one needs a compromise. The world (except the US) agreed to use this new map together. It's not a conflict.

Here's an image I made to show the difference between Robinson and Equal Earth:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_Equal_...

Whichever you prefer, what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator.

“Robinson projection” makes me think of Canadian fasteners.

I'm partial to the Goode Homolosine projection, next is whatever NatGeo standardized on. Of course, the best is an actual globe --but decent sized ones are too expensive and the beach ball ones are just not very well made.

I could’ve sworn that Robinson had already replaced Mercator by the ‘90s, so I was surprised to see defenders of the latter.

That is the best one, no idea why its not standard.

https://xkcd.com/977/

I have a Waterman on my wall :)

I like the aesthetics of Robinson, but it gives you the worst of both worlds: it's neither conformal like Mercator nor equal-area for honest data visualization. It's essentially a spline fit over 38 arbitrary numbers chosen to look nice, whereas Equal Earth accomplishes true equal area with a clean, 4-coefficient polynomial.

Equal Earth is basically Robinson with a more straightforward formula and accurate areas.

Why would the world feel the need to compromise when all UN countries, except for one agree on the projection. The solution is simply to ignore the minority, especially if it has a government that itself has always refused to compromise with others.

Isn't this more like a 1997 website, though? ;-)

(I.e., all the webpages with a rotating globe with "News" spelled around it in the fashion of the animated Universal logo, embedded as an animated GIF [GIF89a].)

> European children will look at the map and feel less significant.

They might instead feel even more more "important" for achieving so much with such a small territory. I know I was somewhat shocked as a kid when I learnt that France was that small country when I had always thought for some reason that it was Greenland (vaguely the same shape I guess, and big enough to feel like it was important. It was certainly not a Mercator projection by the way, Greenland was still a reasonable size on that map on the wall in the classroom).

Instead France was just this small piece of land and it was still so important, and it felt a bit impressive.

I think the thing is people will find a way to feel significant one way or another, and maps probably aren't the main means of doing so.

Why does the size of a county's territory matter so much? Russia is much bigger than the US or China, is it more important? Australia has about three quarters of the land area of the US, is it as significant?

Its an equal area projection which means it preserves relative area.

Both kids in Europe and Africa will actually end up with a more correct idea of how large both their continents are.

Why would anyone object to reducing their inflated size to normal size if it means artificially shrunk continents can be seen at their true size?

I think the ones who got diminished did it for both idealistic and PR reasons.

I mean, if you're France or the UK, you want to keep good relationships with Africa, and probably do feel some minor guilt about colonialism. This is a vote that costs you little, so it's reasonable you'd side with it.

I'd love to hear from the folks that downvoted this carefully neutral observation.

I ponder whether, if the poles flipped and we survived that relatively intact, there would be a sudden enthusiasm for "South is up".

Yes. Specially, touch enabled screens with dynamically rendered graphics.

The Google Maps app on my iPhone at one point years ago switched to having a globe as its base, like Google Earth. It was great.

Then Google switched it back to Mercator. But you can scroll infinitely to the left or right, so its base is actually now “Mercator rolled into a tube.” Somehow that’s even worse!

The projection you see with your eyes is actually not that great in a sense. You can only see half of the world at a time and it's quite distorted as you move towards the edge. Also on a computer you should be able to "spin" any map projection, not just a globe.

Screens are still 2D objects requiring projections.

The distortions in maps with non orthogonal axes are evident already looking at Europe (though with centering at Greenwich). So, not just the "Map of America (of the Americas)" or "Map of Australia"... The compromises are just everywhere. Of course.

(Yes, I get what you meant. I am just suggesting other angles.)

Don't give the lying-felon-in-chief any ideas.

The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you.

> it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter

> I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.

> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand

Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.

For the purposes I use world maps for, correct relative sizing is the paramount thing I'm looking for in a projection. I generally use it to give me a rough idea of distances. Boggs seems inferior, at a glance I have no idea how far it is from NYC to London, for example. I feel like Mercator is similarly bad in terms of distances being uniform. What do you use maps for where Boggs is superior?

>I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.

It's not the most pressing issue in the world, but long-term, maps do shape conceptions about the world that we don't personally know. So it might be symbolic, but symbols are powerful.

The UN is a body that is intended to facilitate global cooperation. This symbolic change better represents the body's members and updates an incorrect visualization, which leads to better cooperation and representation.

Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.

A cartographer ranked nine xkcd map projections[1]. He reverse engineered several and remade them with R.

[1] https://geospatialstuff.com/posts/2025/05/16/xkcd-bad-projec...

Oh, it's not often we get an entire category of XKCD comics: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Bad_Map_...

I'm partial to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2256:_Bad_Map_Pro...

I think a "reversed" south-at-the-top is a good idea to at least be aware of. I don't think it makes sense to reverse it since it just flips the problem, but it is (very slightly?) unlucky for the southern hemisphere.

why the /s?

https://mapdesign.icaci.org/2014/02/mapcarte-38365-mcarthurs...

Idk, I’m just going to call it Sub-American Africa

It’s been called Equal Earth since 2018. The word “equal” here (likely?) refers to the fact it’s an equal-area projection, although it could be politically charged.

That's such a weird statement.

The word "equal" has been used in maths since centuries without any baggage at all. And since a projection (how to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat surface) is a mathematical undertaking it's perfectly fine to think in mathematical terms.

I think it is actually you now that tries to impose this load onto the term, not the original name givers of the projection.

Also, this "this is loaded, let's use something else" is puny. Decades ago, "fat" was loaded. So people used "strong" --- which is IMHO blatantly wrong. But hey, people still said it derogatory, so it was burned in that context. Then it became "big". But the derogatory use stayed, so that term is now also burned in that context. And then "obese" is now used ... guess how long it takes still that word is burned, too. Seldom do people realize that they shouldn't fight the wording, but the derogatory use. But instead they attack the words. The situation stays as is, but word after word becomes taboo. How nonsensical!

Also observe how I wrote "in that context". I talked about "fat", "big" and "strong" in context of body mass. But then some SJW come and declare these words to be bad in any context. Eventually we can't fish a big fish anymore ... because some idiots hijacked the meaning of "big".

Loading up completely normal words is IMHO nonsense. In conclusion, Equal Earth is, to me, a very fine name.