The African Union, an intergovernmental group of 55 African international locations, endorsed a model of the world map that extra precisely displays the continent’s scale earlier this month, as first reported by Reuters.
The union mentioned it might again the Right the Map marketing campaign to strain governments and world organizations to part out the extensively used Mercator map in favor of the Equal Earth projection first proposed in 2018. The previous distorts the Earth’s poles, making landmasses like Greenland and Antarctica seem disproportionately massive. Advocates for the change argue that the map misrepresents and diminishes the world’s notion of the African continent. The Equal Earth map, then again, enlarges the continent to extra precisely mirror its relative dimension.
First devised in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, the ever-present Mercator projection options longitude strains which are equally spaced vertically throughout the globe. Latitude strains, nonetheless, are inconsistently spaced, with the gaps between them rising wider the additional out they’re from the equator. This scaling creates a distorted, stretched-out impact on the prime and backside of the Earth. Because of this, Greenland seems about equal in dimension to the whole African continent, when in actuality the latter is about 14 occasions bigger, in keeping with some estimates.
Screenshot of the Google Maps app, which makes use of the Mercator projection on its cell app (screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)
“The current size of the map of Africa is wrong,” Moky Makura, govt director of the nonprofit group Africa No Filter, informed Reuters in an interview concerning the Mercator map projection. “It’s the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop.”
Within the Equal Earth map projection, continents seem to extra carefully match their actual relative sizes. In contrast to the Mercator map, during which latitude and longitude strains meet at 90-degree angles, its strains are curved to mirror the earth’s spherical form, resulting in a extra correct portrayal of the African continent’s scale.
Some know-how corporations enable customers to modify between map projections, however the Mercator stays the default on many companies. A Google spokesperson informed Hyperallergic that customers can select between it and globe views of the Earth on its desktop Google Maps interface. The Google Maps cell app, nonetheless, makes use of the Mercator map, in keeping with Reuters.
The Right the Map marketing campaign launched a petition calling for the United Nations and the British Broadcasting Firm (BCC) to undertake the Equal Earth map, encouraging different organizations to observe swimsuit. The petition had garnered practically 7,000 signatures as of the time of publication.
“This distortion isn’t just a cartographic error — it’s a narrative failure,” Right the Map’s petition textual content reads. “In a world where size is often equated with power, misrepresenting Africa’s true scale reinforces harmful misconceptions about its geopolitical and economic significance.”
