Which is, at least in my mind, the old, old question of how to put a map of the Earth, an oblate sphere, onto a flat piece of paper and have it be useful. Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny have worked out a new such projection, which they call the Equal Earth map projection, and describe it in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science, and go into detail at ResearchGate. While I, as well as my Arts Editor, enjoy maps, I’ve never looked into the technical details, so I thought this paper was interesting. They begin with their aesthetic sensibilities:
The first step in developing the Equal Earth projection for world maps was deciding on its basic characteristics. To create a world map with an appearance familiar to as many people as possible, it must have an equatorial aspect and north-up orientation. We rejected developing another equal-area cylindrical projection, such as the Gall-Peters. Transforming the spherical Earth to fit in a rectangle introduces excessive shape distortions. In the case of Gall-Peters, the continents in mid-latitude and tropical areas are highly elongated on the north–south axis. Conversely, the pole lines that stretch across the entire width of the map severely elongate polar regions in the east–west direction (Figure 1). We also rejected the concept of an equal-area projection that depicts the poles as points, such as the Mollweide and sinusoidal projections. On these projections, the meridians that steeply converge towards the poles present a practical problem for cartographers.
Etc. Then they move on to the technical details, including the equations to use to map to and from a projection. After that, they described their approach of combining two other approaches in order to find that pleased them.
They’re pleased with their continents in this projection, which begs the question: how about the voids, i.e., the oceans? Are they equally accurate?
Do they care?
Their motivation:
A wave of news stories that ran in late March 2017 motivated the creation of the Equal Earth map projection. Boston Public Schools announced the switch to the Gall-Peters projection for all classroom maps showing the entire world (Boston Public Schools 2017). The media reporting by major national and international news outlets, such as The Guardian (Walters 2017), The Huffington Post (Workneh 2017), National Public Radio (Dwyer 2017) or Newsweek (Williams 2017), largely focused on these all-too-familiar themes: the Mercator projection is bad for world maps because it grossly enlarges the high-latitude regions at the expense of the tropics (true); nowadays, the Mercator projection is still the standard for making world maps (false 1 ); and only maps using the equal-area Gall-Peters projection can right this wrong (false) (Sriskandarajah 2003, Vujakovic 2003, Monmonier 2004). The reaction among cartographers to this announcement, and to others like it in years past, was predictable: frustration (Vujakovic 2003, Monmonier 2004, Crowe 2017, Giaimo 2017, Mahnken 2017). It is noteworthy that most of the news stories did not publish comments from professional cartographers. Our message –that Gall-Peters is not the only equal-area projection – was not getting through.
A look into the world of cartography.
I’ve not shown a sample here because it is, after all, their professional product. Well, OK, here’s one:
Source: Shade Relief
