EqualGlobe — the world at its true size

A chart for sailors (1569)

Why a navigator's trick stretched the poles.

In 1569 Gerardus Mercator published a world map "corrected for the use of sailors". Its trick: a line of constant compass bearing is a straight line, so a navigator can rule a course and follow it. Keeping every angle true forces the map to stretch the world more and more toward the poles.

The stretch is the price of the property, not a flaw. Scale grows with the secant of the latitude and area with its square: at 60°, twice the stretch and four times the area. Greenland, near 72° north, is drawn about ten times too large; DR Congo, on the equator, is barely touched. Here they look alike. In truth DR Congo is the larger.

For three centuries the chart stayed on ships. Once chronometers solved longitude in the 1800s it moved to classroom walls and atlases, a job it was never designed for.

The straight line that isn't the shortest (1802)

Great-circle sailing: the course a ruler on the map won't give you.

A rhumb line, a straight course on Mercator, holds one compass bearing all the way to your destination: turn the ship once and hold the wheel. It is easy to steer and, except along the equator or a meridian, never the shortest way there. In 1802 Nathaniel Bowditch published The American Practical Navigator with tables for the shorter course, one that keeps changing bearing as it goes: the great circle.

A great circle is what you get by slicing the sphere with a plane through its very centre, so its arc between any two points is the shortest path over the surface there is. It is why a flight from London to Los Angeles curves up over Canada on the in-flight map instead of running due west: that curve is the straight line, on a globe.

No flat map can draw every great circle as a straight line and keep every shape and area honest at once, which is exactly this app's recurring theme. Equal Earth bends it, Mercator can make it swing the wrong way entirely, and only the globe shows the arc for what it is: the shortest string you could stretch between two pins on a ball.

The equal-area rebels (1855 to 1973)

Gall, Peters, and the schools that switched.

In 1855 James Gall, a Scottish clergyman, presented a projection that kept areas true and was largely ignored. In 1973 the filmmaker Arno Peters relaunched almost the same projection as the "Peters World Map", framing Mercator as a distortion that shrank the Global South. Cartographers objected to his overclaims; UNESCO, churches and aid agencies adopted the map anyway.

In 1989 seven North American geographic organisations resolved that no rectangular projection should be used for general world maps. Atlases moved to compromise projections: National Geographic to Robinson in 1988, then Winkel Tripel in 1998.

Schools kept the argument alive. Boston Public Schools switched to Gall-Peters in 2017; Nebraska banned Mercator from classrooms in 2024. Norway and Nigeria, highlighted here, are within a factor of three in area. On Mercator, Norway looks like the giant.

One truth, many shapes (1805 to 1923)

Equal-area maps only promise one thing. It is not shape.

Equal-area means a region's size on the map matches its size on the ground, wherever it sits. It says nothing about shape. Mollweide's ellipse, the Gall-Peters rectangle from the last chapter, Equal Earth's rounded outline and Goode's homolosine below are all, mathematically, equally honest about size, and look almost nothing alike.

Karl Mollweide published his ellipse in 1805: longitude lines curving gently from a straight equator to two poles that are each a single point. It never caught on for general maps, shapes feel cramped near its corners, but the maths became the foundation several later projections, Goode's included, are built on.

In 1923 J. Paul Goode combined two projections into one: a sinusoidal band near the equator, where shapes stay closest to true, flanked by Mollweide above and below. He then went further still and cut the whole map open over the oceans, into separate lobes, so no single piece had to stretch as far to stay equal-area. The result looks torn apart. That is deliberate: it is the price of keeping every remaining piece closer to its true shape.

Equal Earth projection, Wikipedia

Goode homolosine projection, Wikipedia

xkcd #977, Map Projections

The web brings Mercator back (2005)

Square tiles put the old map on every phone.

Google Maps launched on square Mercator tiles. The maths is fast, tiles stack neatly at every zoom, and shapes stay right at street level, exactly what a navigation map needs. Every web map since has copied it. A projection atlases had retired became the most viewed map in history.

The cost only shows when you zoom out. Since 2018 Google Maps on desktop shows a globe at the smallest scales; on phones the flat Mercator world is still the default. Two jobs, one projection, pulling in opposite directions.

EqualGlobe splits them: the world view is equal-area, and far enough in it hands off to a street map, where Mercator's shape-keeping is the right choice. You are at street level over New York now, on Mercator, where it belongs.

Equal Earth (2018)

The projection the UN chose, and what it gives up.

Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny published Equal Earth in August 2018 as a direct answer to Boston's choice: equal-area, yet it still looks like the world people recognise. Parallels are straight, meridians curve gently, and the rounded outline hints at the sphere. NASA used it within weeks.

The circles are Tissot's indicatrices: identical circles on the ground, each 445 km across, projected onto the map. On Equal Earth every one keeps its area; near the poles they squash into ellipses. That shape cost is what this projection pays instead of Mercator's area cost.

No flat map avoids both. Mercator keeps angles, Equal Earth keeps area, Robinson and Winkel Tripel split the difference. Only a globe keeps everything.

The UN votes 164 to 1 (2026)

164 to 1. What the resolution actually says.

In April 2025 two African non-profits, Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, launched "Correct the Map", asking the UN, the World Bank and the BBC to adopt Equal Earth. The African Union endorsed it that August and asked Togo to carry it to New York.

On 4 September 2026 the General Assembly adopted the resolution, 164 votes to 1 with six abstentions. It does not ban Mercator. It encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use equal-area projections wherever relative size matters, and to teach the limits of flat maps.

Togo says it will be the first to rewrite its geography textbooks, and will host UNESCO, the African Union and mapping companies in Lomé in 2027. This globe is centred on Togo.