Surely the Mercator is the most familiar, and most infamously over-used, of all map projections. It is well-suited to sea-faring or airborne navigation, because it is conformal, and the angle between any two points represents a course of constant compass heading (a “rhumb line”). However, it exhibits this property at the cost of gross distortion of the relative areas of continents. Distortion increases to infinity at the poles, so equatorial regions are dramatically minimized by comparison. An episode of The West Wing touches on an on-going real-life United Nations controversy over the misuse of this map, due to its diminution of the area of Africa and South America.

Mercator

Copyright © W. Murray Sexton

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