Continents are shown true to their real size in new world map

NEW DELHI : Three cartographers have collaborated to develop a new world map that depicts the true sizes of all continents without distorting their shapes too much.

The Equal Earth Map Projection was developed by Bojan Savric from the Environmental Systems Research Institute in California; Tom Patterson, executive director of North American Cartographic Information Society in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Bernhard Jenny from Monash University in Melbourne.

The widely used standard Mercator projection, developed in 1569, heavily distorts the size of continents, making Africa look tiny and Greenland and Russia stretched out. In the new map, the longitudes are equally spaced and do not excessively curve outwards. Instead, they mimic the appearance of the elliptical arcs of the globe, making the new map visually appealing.

The height-to-width aspect ratio of 1:2.05458 is very close to the natural ratio of a sphere and pole lines are 0.59247 times the length of the equator.

The Equal Earth map was created in response to public schools in Boston adopting another map, the Gall-peter map projection, to depict the true sizes of the continents in 2017.

“The reaction among cartographers to this announcement... was predictable: frustration. Our message – that Gall-peters is not the only equal-area projection – was not getting through,” the authors wrote in a recent paper in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.