As soon as I heard that the United Nations would be voting on a new map of the world, one that better reflected Africa’s true size, I knew the U.S. would vote against it. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened. I wish I could say I’m clairvoyant, or that I have genius insight into U.S. foreign policy, but this was entirely predictable.
As you may remember from high school, most maps of the world use the Mercator projection, which features considerable distortions, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. Maybe you’ve wondered why Greenland and Africa look roughly the same size on such maps, when Africa is actually 14 times larger, or why Antarctica looks infinitely large, when that isn’t true in real life. Discussion of those and other discrepancies have been around for a long time. They even made their way into a 2001 episode of “The West Wing.” In season two, members of a cartographic society meet with White House press secretary C.J. Cregg on Big Block of Cheese Day to lobby for a change to the map, blowing her mind in the process by literally turning her world upside down. It turns out that it’s difficult to squish a sphere into a flat rectangle without some disfigurement, but the Mercator errors have finally led to pushback.
