I remember being told this in high school and being totally confused. My teacher told us that a standard map, or even a globe, is inaccurate. She explained why but I didn’t understand. Why is this?
In: Technology
A globe would be inaccurate simply because of its scale. One inch on the globe covers a small country.
A world map is the same + a flat surface can not represent a curved surface as of our planet. You need to stretch certain areas. We decided to stretch the top and bottom leaving equator fairly untouched, but we could have stretched it another direction if we wanted to.
While there are tons of answers here agreeing that standard maps are inaccurate, that is mostly true for maps *of an entire planet*.
What I have not seen written is that there are standard map projection systems that are designed to depict zoomed-in portions of the earth’s surface and which are perfectly accurate enough for navigation, building, and recording scientific data. The USGS uses UTM for topographic maps. Many states or countries or regions have their own systems (i.e., the Florida State Plane system is widely used by surveyors and for presentation of all sorts of geospatial data).
The better system is from state-sized or the like which tend to act as if the equator was moved to near the subject area (the equator is where error on any map is lowest), and these are designed/optimized by professional cartographers to minimize error across the entire system. UTM is kind of a can of worms to explain, but it historically suits the depiction of blocks of surveyed land in a way that is easy to navigate and easy for the navigator to understand its drawbacks (errors), which tend to be small when zoomed-in enough.
I guess my point is that when zoomed-in to a small enough subject area on globe/map, there are projection systems out there that are acurate and reliable enough for the highest level of practical, real-life applications.
Peel an orange. Now, try to shape it into a perfect rectangle. This is the issue even the most sophisticated projection softwares run into when trying to take the globe and project it into a rectangular shape that we see on a classic map.
Get a tangerine and peel it all in one piece, then try and squish it flat and you will understand
*Drags Russia onto US*
*Suddenly realizes how damn long the Trans-siberian is*
Also the size difference between the North and Central Pacific is sneaky, you can cross from LA to Kamchatka using a Russia measuring stick with St Pete in Kamchatka and Vladivostok in LA. Shift St Pete down to Hawaii and Vladivostok can’t make it to Mexico.
If you take an orange and peel it, then try to push the peel flat on a table. When you do this you will have gaps and this is why a map cant be accurate.
How this is solved depends on the map, the one you see most frequently essentially puts a cylinder around the globe and the just project what is straight towards the center axis of the cylinder.
Other ways include trying to preserve either shape or distance of the land or the sea
I don’t know if this can really be explained without using images, or even better, video. There are many videos and animations that explain this really well.
[https://laughingsquid.com/the-problem-with-map-projections-and-why-all-maps-are-wrong/](https://laughingsquid.com/the-problem-with-map-projections-and-why-all-maps-are-wrong/)
This animation displays one of the most accurate flat maps, but North isn’t up.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dymaxion_2003_animation_small1.gif](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dymaxion_2003_animation_small1.gif)
Globes are usually accurate.
The earth isn’t exactly spherical or even exactly spherical, but the difference is slight enough that for something like a globe you put on your desk, it doesn’t matter.
Maps however are inherently inaccurate.
You can’t take a curved surface, like the surface of the earth, and turn it into a flat plane, like a map, without losing something.
Usually you end up with distances and areas or angles being all wrong.
When you create a world map you have to decide which aspects you really want to preserve and which ones you want to sacrifice.
Traditional maps have grown out of maps used for navigation, that answered questions like: “Which direction will I need to travel to get where I want to go?”
These maps tended to have the side-effect of distorting the size of areas, making places near the poles look larger than similar places near the equators.
There are many many different map projections all of them have their own strengths and weaknesses, but non are perfect because mathematically that isn’t possible.
In addition to unavoidable inaccuracies there are also subjective choices you can make that prioritize some things over others. It is not so much about accuracy, but what you care about.
The standard map has the northern hemisphere with Europe, Asia, North America and north Africa at the top and the southern parts of south American and Africa as well as Australia, Antarctica and a bunch of smaller islands at the bottom. Turning that around to have Australia at the top would not make in any more or less accurate, but someone who lives in Australia might prefer it that way.
You can also choose what you put at the center where distortions tend to be the smallest and where everything is centered around. traditional maps center around the point where the equator crosses the prime meridian. That puts Africa and Europe at the center and puts the edge of the map in the middle of the pacific where nobody lives.
You can as well have maps centered on a pole or your own country with everything else revolving around it. This is not better or worse, just different.
There is no perfect map, just a lot of subjective matters of taste and the question of finding the right tool for the right job.
Anyone who is trying to convince you that their map-projection is objectively better than others (especially if they go on about comparing the size of Africa with Greenland and relate that to colonialism), is probably an idiot who is best avoided in case their stupidity is infectious.
It difficult to put a 3-dimensional sphere on a 2-dimensional piece of paper. You can fit all of China, Russia, and India into the continent of Africa but if you looked at modern maps you wouldn’t believe it. That’s because the small parts at the top and bottom of the globe get stretched way out of proportion.
There is a great website dedicated to fixing this misconception:
https://thetruesize.com/
Because a map is a two dimensional object trying to represent a three dimensional surface, so if you represent the whole globe there are problems representing both the poles and the equator where objects are either too far apart or too close together. There are various forms of projections which minimise the errors this creates Mercator, Cassini, Gauss–Krüger and Sinusoidal are just some of them.
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