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
I’m not sure why they would say a globe is inaccurate, but normal two dimensional maps become more inaccurate the further away from the equator you look because it’s taking an area much smaller than the equator and stretching it out to be as wide on the paper as the equator itself.
A globe is definitely accurate.
The standard maps are inaccurate because the world is round, and maps are flat. There’s no way to project a spherical map on a flat surface without stretching or tearing parts of the map. In the former case you get maps like the [Mercator projection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection) which makes areas closer to the poles huge, and in the latter case you get odd things like [this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goode_homolosine_projection).
The globe is *technically* inaccurate, because the earth is a slight ellipsoid rather than a sphere, and chances are the globe doesn’t take that into account, but the error is trivial for anything a regular globe is used for – also far far less than the inaccuracies of that result from measuring tolerances.
The flat maps are inaccurate as you cannot project a curved surface onto a flat one without losing integrity in some combination of size, shape, direction or distance, with the errors becoming more significant the bigger the area shown on the map. For anything in the range <50 miles square the errors are trivial outside of extremely high precision applications, and if you’re doing those you know all about this issue. There are a lot of different projection methods that each preserve some of these qualities better than others, basically you have to trade off the properties you don’t care about as much for those that you do.
I hope this is allowed. [The West Wing](https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY) had a great, informative bit about why maps are not always correct. I believe the visuals are especially helpful
If you map a curved surface to a flat surface, you can’t do this accurately – in effect, you’re scrunching things up. You have a chance to what kind of inaccuracies you get.
In a standard Mercator projection, you keep local angles and shapes accurate. This is useful when you want a map to tell you where to go.
On the other hand, it distorts distances. Things near the poles look much larger than they are – compare Greenland on a standard (Mercator projection) map and on a globe.
In another context, you may prefer a map that keeps relative sizes or distances, but distorts shapes. There are quite a few different projections available, but none of them are perfect.
You can’t translate a sphere to a flat square easily. So to make a map it’s typical to distort the image in order to create something people can easily visualize.
Modern maps are north centric because they were developed in Europe and continued in North America (as far as where most map makers originated from) so they place more focus on the northern hemisphere than the southern. This makes southern lands disproportionately small when compared to the northern lands.
Mapping a mostly-spherical object to a flat map is a difficult thing to do if you want to preserve all of the data. The maps we are used to generally do a bad job of representing the true size of countries; it warps the dimensions based on how close/far you are from the equator, changing how we view the size/shape/tilt of each country. Things like Greenland appear very large, when in reality they’re not any bigger than Brazil. Antarctica seems like a HUGE, interminable landmass, but it’s actually half the size Africa. You can easily check this by comparing the listed sizes on Wikipedia
Check out thetruesize.com to get a better idea. It lets you drag countries around the map and adjusts the size accordingly.
You can’t take a round map and make it a rectangle without squishing or stretching parts. This is fine, it’s not evil that it is that way.
But it is worth knowing about, it’s pretty obvious that “we” picked the standard map to be the one that centers on the western world and enhances it’s size. North America grows, Africa shrinks, Alaska gets to be bigger than India, europe gets to be giant, Etc. Like no one sat down and said “ha ha, lets make white dominated countries the biggest!” but it sort of did work out that way, the standard map is really focused on making america and europe bigger and more central to the map and putting some other countries into the “it’s fine if this ends up distorted, who cares” bucket. And it’s worth thinking about how that could be different and the map we happen to use is just one possible map.
All flat maps are inaccurate, there is no way to transform the surface of a sphere into two dimensions without distorting, size, shape, or relative direction. This is old news, they pointed this out to us in grade school.
Every now and then, people get political over it. Developed countries, like those in North American and Europe, tend to be in the higher latitudes the popular Mercator projection makes too large, while less developed countries tend to be more tropical and appear smaller by comparison. Some people think this perpetuates bias or is even a part of some grand conspiracy.
Remove an orange peel all in one piece and lay it flat. Points on the surface of the peel are the same size and distance from each other as when they were on the sphere. But then stretch out the peel to make it rectangle (like a map). To do that, you have to stretch the peel. Points get farther from each other. Imagine doing that the surface of the Earth. Realize that where you choose to do the stretching has an impact on things’ relative size and relationship to each other.
Or do it in reverse. Take a sheet of paper draw a map on it, try to wrap it around a sphere-like object. Notice all the ways it doesn’t quite fit. Those are inaccuracies.
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