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
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.
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