Mid Morning Mapping

While at work, I catch myself looking up at this interesting map above my desk. It is called the Peters' Projection or the Gall-Peters' Projection. All world maps have the same problem - representing a 3 dimensional globe in 2 dimensions. Other projections normally end up distorting the size of certain countries and land masses to make it work. The Gall-Peters' Projection changes this trend and represents each country with its actual size. This causes some interesting comparisons:

1. Northern countries (US, Canada, Europe, Russia, etc), in the traditional Mercator Maps appear much larger than the south, when in reality the North is half as big.

2. Traditional maps show Europe to be larger than South America when South America is 6.9 million square miles and Europe is only 3.8 million.

3. Mexico appears smaller than Alaska in traditional maps, when in fact, Mexico is larger.

4. The US and Canada appear larger than Africa in traditional maps when Africa is 4.2 million square miles larger.

5. Scandinavia appears larger than India which is also not true.

6. Also, the positioning of traditional maps is also distorted (in terms of the equator) and the Gall-Peters' projection attempts to correct this too.

Very interesting in terms of our world view. The Gall-Peters' projection is not without criticism - mainly for distorting the shape of countries - but it appears that no map can be objectively accurate and it is a sense of the map's goal and it lack of objectivity that seems to give it quality. Interesting to think about the implications of our understanding of the shape of the world and its countries and also how map making/projections relate to ideas like historiography.

Here is the wikipedia page on the Gall-Peters' Projection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall-Peters_projection