The African Union has backed a campaign to end the use by governments and international organisations of the 16th-century Mercator map of the world in favour of one that more accurately displays Africa’s size.
Created by the cartographer Gerardus Mercator for navigation, the projection distorts continent sizes, enlarging areas near the poles like North America and Greenland while shrinking Africa and South America. “It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not,” the African Union Commission deputy chair, Selma Malika Haddadi, told Reuters, saying the Mercator fostered a false impression that Africa was “marginal”, despite being the world’s second-largest continent by area, with more than 1 billion people. The union has 55 member states.
This projection feels like the uncanny valley to me. It’s obviously an overall pattern I’m familiar with, but it’s still slightly jarring.
Mercator is a good projection for navigation for a variety of reasons. It should never have been used for geology classes in schools, but I think what originally happened is schools would just buy a nautical chart and put it on the wall.
Even when I was at school long before that episode of West Wing, my classroom had a Robinson Projection map, so the whole controversy seems like something that was ginned up possibly decades after Mercator was no longer in use except where it’s needed.
That being said Google used a broken version of mercator on their maps for many years…