CONTINENTS GET THE RIGHT SIZE

Mercator turned the circular world into a flat rectangle in his maps. The method meant that compass directions are always straight lines – but it also meant that land masses did not get the correct areas in proportion to each other. In 2018, US and Australian scientists created a new world map known as “Equal Earth”, that gives the continents their right sizes (with a bit of distortion). This is a pseudo-cylindrical map projection.

In the “Equal Earth” map, the land masses have their correct sizes.