Yesterday, I posted
this map on the Polemicist Facebook
page:
After
seeing
some of the responses, I realized that many people may never have seen,
and are
not aware of, the famous Peters Projection Map, and the issues it
addresses:
To
summarize
the issue: As
pointed out on the Peters
Map site, any flat map
has a problem "projecting" a three-dimensional globe on a
two-dimensional surface, and any such map will introduce some
distortion. No map
will show both the size and shape of
geographical formations accurately.
The
map with which we are all familiar, the Mercator projection map, which
was
designed around 1659, was not
designed to depict relative sizes
of continents and
countries accurately, but to show the shapes of continents fairly well. The
Peters Map, first presented by Dr. Peter Arno in Germany in
1974 (and first published in an English-version in 1983), is an equal area map that shows all countries,
continents or oceans according to their actual size, and makes accurate
comparisons possible.
