Mercator and Peter Projections

Imagine a round globe. Now, imagine you had to draw all the parts of the globe on a flat sheet of paper. How would you do that? Where would you cut the globe? What would you do about the fact that its surface won’t lay flat? Cartographers have struggled with this problem for centuries. They have developed a number of mathematical projections that try to take into account the world’s sphericity (roundness) while accurately depicting the relative size of all the continents. The debate over how to draw the map of the world has been quite heated!

The projection developed by Gerhard Mercator, a Flemish cartographer, in 1569 became the most commonly used projection because it portrayed compass directions as straight lines. However, this was achieved at the expense of distortion of relative size, especially towards the poles. Mercator’s Greenland appears much larger than Australia, which is in reality more than three times the size of that North Atlantic island. But more subtle effects result from Mercator’s view of the world . . . Is it a coincidence that a map which preserves compass direction (a boon for ocean navigation) shows Britain and Europe (the major sea-going and colonizing powers of the past 400 years) as relatively large with respect to most of the colonized nations?

^{Source: Turnbull, David. Maps are Territories, Science is an Atlas. Victoria Australia: Deakin University Press, 1989. 6-7.}

Peter’s projection (below) attempts to correct the Mercator projection by creating an equal-area projection, so that the countries in the Southern Hemisphere are not minimized. The critics of Peter’s projection have said that map looks like “wet, ragged, long underwear hung out to dry.'' (Wood, 1992, p. 60)