• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

This Is The Most Accurate Flat Map Of Earth

January 24, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Representing a 3D world on a 2D map is always going to end up with some issues and some compromises. No matter how accurate you try to make it, you will end up with stretched areas, squashed countries, or else parts of the map cut out altogether.

The map you are likely familiar with is one based on the Mercator projection, published by cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It’s a cylindrical map projection, in which you place the globe into a cylinder and then project each point of the map onto a corresponding point on the cylinder. Meridians (imaginary vertical lines going through the Earth from the North to the South Pole) are mapped onto vertical lines equally spaced apart on the map, and circles of latitude (imaginary horizontal lines from east to west) are mapped onto equally spaced horizontal lines.

Advertisement

The Mercator projection is good for navigation because it represents courses of constant bearing as straight segments, meaning ships have to course correct for the curvature of the Earth less frequently. However, it also results in distortions of size and shape.

In cylindrical maps – as is the case with the Mercator projection – areas around the equator remain roughly accurate, but the further you move from the equator, the more distorted and inflated landmasses become. Essentially, this is why Greenland appears gigantic and is represented as the same size as Africa, when in fact it’s 1/14 as big. 

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

There are maps which show you the true size of countries, but you wouldn’t want to navigate using them.

Advertisement

“One can’t make everything perfect,” Richard Gott, emeritus professor of astrophysics at Princeton explained in press release.  “A map that is good at one thing may not be good at depicting other things.” The Mercator projection, for example, depicts local shapes well but distorts the surface areas near the North and South Poles to the point that the polar regions are often chopped off.

In 2007, Gott and his colleague David Goldberg developed a system for scoring maps based on measurement of distortions within it, finding that the Winkel-Tripel projection scored the best for having the fewest distortions.



However, it wasn’t perfect, including a “boundary cut” in the Pacific Ocean, making the distance between Hawaii and Asia appear bigger than it actually is.

Advertisement

Years later, the team decided to make their own flat map, drawing inspiration from a map made by Buckminster Fuller, which preserved the size of countries and areas by turning the world into this monstrosity, introducing big gaps between close countries and hacking several in two.

Dymaxion projection map of Earth.

The map is good at displaying size, but not a lot else.

The team had the idea of creating a two-sided map, showing either the Eastern and Western Hemispheres or the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. On the Northern-Southern Hemisphere map, the edge of the map is quite neatly the equator, and both versions include no boundary cuts.

A two-sided map, showing each hemisphere

The two-sided map.

Image credit: J. Richard Gott, Robert Vanderbei and David Goldberg, arXiv 2021 (CC BY)

“If you’re an ant, you can crawl from one side of this ‘phonograph record’ to the other,” Gott said. “We have continuity over the equator. Africa and South America are draped over the edge, like a sheet over a clothesline, but they’re continuous.”

Using the map, you can measure distances between two points more accurately than on any other map, as it includes fewer distance errors. According to their score system, it is the most flat map of Earth.

Advertisement

“Our map is actually more like the globe than other flat maps,” Gott added. “To see all of the globe, you have to rotate it; to see all of our new map, you simply have to flip it over.”

A paper discussing the map is posted to preprint server arXiv.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Disney+ ‘Hawkeye’ trailer shows Clint Barton’s past catching up with him
  2. Canadian province of Ontario to further ease pandemic restrictions
  3. People Are Only Just Learning Where You’re Supposed To Store Ketchup
  4. World First As Stable Qubit For Quantum Computers Achieved At Room Temperature

Source Link: This Is The Most Accurate Flat Map Of Earth

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Living Cement: The Microbes In Your Walls Could Power The Future
  • What Can Your Earwax Reveal About Your Health?
  • Ever Seen A Giraffe Use An Inhaler? Now You Can, And It’s Incredibly Wholesome
  • Martian Mudstone Has Features That Might Be Biosignatures, New Brain Implant Can Decode Your Internal Monologue, And Much More This Week
  • Crocodiles Weren’t All Blood-Thirsty Killers, Some Evolved To Be Plant-Eating Vegetarians
  • Stratospheric Warming Event May Be Unfolding In The Southern Polar Vortex, Shaking Up Global Weather Systems
  • 15 Years Ago, Bees In Brooklyn Appeared Red After Snacking Where They Shouldn’t
  • Carnian Pluvial Event: It Rained For 2 Million Years — And It Changed Planet Earth Forever
  • There’s Volcanic Unrest At The Campi Flegrei Caldera – Here’s What We Know
  • The “Rumpelstiltskin Effect”: When Just Getting A Diagnosis Is Enough To Start The Healing
  • In 1962, A Boy Found A Radioactive Capsule And Brought It Inside His House — With Tragic Results
  • This Cute Creature Has One Of The Largest Genomes Of Any Mammal, With 114 Chromosomes
  • Little Air And Dramatic Evolutionary Changes Await Future Humans On Mars
  • “Black Hole Stars” Might Solve Unexplained JWST Discovery
  • Pretty In Purple: Why Do Some Otters Have Purple Teeth And Bones? It’s All Down To Their Spiky Diets
  • The World’s Largest Carnivoran Is A 3,600-Kilogram Giant That Weighs More Than Your Car
  • Devastating “Rogue Waves” Finally Have An Explanation
  • Meet The “Masked Seducer”, A Unique Bat With A Never-Before-Seen Courtship Display
  • Alaska’s Salmon River Is Turning Orange – And It’s A Stark Warning
  • Meet The Heaviest Jelly In The Seas, Weighing Over Twice As Much As A Grand Piano
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version