Out of this world: Why we must redraw all our maps
The world map you know makes New Zealand an afterthought. It’s unfair, and inaccurate. But there’s a simple solution, writes Charlie Mitchell that would flip mapmaking on its head.
Imagine you’re in London, about to fly home to Auckland. At the same time, someone is flying from Porto, in Portugal, to Dunedin. In this thought experiment, jet fuel is not a limitation – the flights are direct and take the shortest possible route.
We might assume the two planes would take a similar path. Two European cities, not far apart, going to two New Zealand cities, about an equal distance apart.
In reality, their paths would be almost diametrically opposite.
The flight from London veers far to the north, up towards the North Pole, over Russia, then downwards in a steep arc east of Japan. The Porto flight goes downwards, deep into Antarctica, then over the Sub-Antarctic Islands.
You can try the experiment again from a different starting point. The shortest path between Los Angeles and Dubai – cities at a similar latitude low in the Northern Hemisphere – is over the North Pole.
It looks confusing, but there’s a simple explanation. The Earth is spherical, but we’re accustomed to seeing it as a flat object, where the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line.
It’s one of many ways our view of the world is distorted, not for any technical or scientific reason, but for reasons primarily to do with outdated geopolitics.
The world map many of us grew up with is called the Mercator Projection.
It was designed by a Flemish mapmaker in the 16th century, and came to be widely used for navigation, largely because it allowed navigators to maintain a constant compass bearing – they could set a start and end point and follow the line between them.
Although good for seafaring, the map has a major downside: it is wildly inaccurate in terms of proportion, increasing the size of land masses far from the equator.
On a Mercator Projection, Greenland is about the same size as Africa, despite the latter being 14 times larger in reality. Ellesmere Island, at the northern tip of Canada, looks similar in size to Australia, despite being smaller than New Zealand.
The True Size, an online mapping tool, lets you move a country to different parts of a map using a Mercator Projection to illustrate this problem. Moving New Zealand to Greenland makes it appear similar in length to all of Africa; moving New Zealand to Central Africa makes it seem smaller than the United Kingdom.
The Mercator Projection has fallen out of favour, mostly because of this distortion. The American Cartographic Association in 1989 passed a resolution condemning rectangular maps in general, which helped lead a transition away from the Mercator projection.
Some racial justice advocates have argued for using equal area projections – maps that correctly depict relative size – which they believe would give greater representation to the Global South. Nowadays, you are more likely to see one of these equal-area maps, such as the Robinson projection, but the Mercator remains widely in use.
It is most notable in the Web Mercator projection, which underlies virtually all online mapping software (appropriately, the main image of its Wikipedia page cuts off New Zealand). At a local level – say, using Google Maps for directions in a city – it makes little difference. But zoom out and the world is, as we’ve become accustomed to seeing it, heavily distorted.
Why is this important?
It has become a running joke that New Zealand is left off world maps.
A ‘‘Maps without New Zealand’’ thread on the online Reddit community has nearly 100,000 members, and is a grim catalogue of one nation’s existence as a global afterthought (the competing ‘‘Maps with too much New Zealand’’ subreddit has a mere 4000 followers).
The issue was the subject of a tongue-in-cheek international tourism campaign, featuring filmmaker Sir Peter Jackson and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and drew the attention of comedian John Oliver.
What is often missing from this discussion is why it happens.
The explanation shows how unsuitable world maps are in the modern era, and how they uniquely disadvantage New Zealand.
Standard world maps are centred on the prime meridian, the point at which the Earth’s longitude is 0 degrees. This is an imaginary line connecting
the north and south poles, running through Greenwich in the United Kingdom, which is also used to determine time zones.
We are all on a meridian; there is no scientific reason the prime meridian should be the one that runs through Greenwich. It was simply set at the height of the British Empire, when the UK was the centre of international shipping, so it was seen as convenient.
The result is that on most maps, Europe and Africa are centrally focused (with the latter often being depicted smaller than it is).
New Zealand is disadvantaged by this more than any other country.
The antipodes of Greenwich – the furthest away point – is off the eastern coast of New Zealand.
Because the world does not naturally fit a rectangle, maps often need to be cropped. New
Zealand, affixed to the bottom right corner, alone, is an obvious piece of detritus to chop.
An important concept in design is ‘‘visual hierarchy’’, based on evidence that our eyes are drawn to certain areas within an image, typically the top-left in cultures that read left to right. This is central to how newspapers (and websites) are designed; many of us will read information in a Z-shaped pattern, starting at the top left, ending in the bottom right.
Another concept is the ‘‘rule of thirds’’, commonly used in photography to compose an image’s focal elements within nine squares. Typically, the least important part of the image is the bottom right.
It is no wonder New Zealand is left off maps; our brains are conditioned to ignore it.
The vital thing to understand about the conventions underlying these maps is that they are made up.
The Earth is a sphere, spinning through threedimensional space. There is no left or right; it has no geographical centre. Magnetic poles orient a north and a south, but they are interchangeable; there’s no reason north can’t be south, or vice versa, and there’s certainly no reason north needs to be at the top.
It’s not necessary for us to rely on maps that inflate the Northern Hemisphere at the expense of the south. There is no physical or cosmic truth demanding New Zealand be condemned to the worst place on the map.
These conventions, arbitrary as they are, have changed how we see the world.
In 1972, NASA released what would become one of the most widely distributed photographs ever taken.
Officially called AS17148-22727, it is better known as the ‘‘Blue Marble’’, the first clear, colour photo of the Earth in its entirety from space.
What is less known about that famous photo is that it’s upside down.
The original photograph, reflecting the perspective of the astronauts, showed Antarctica at the top, with the mass of Africa trailing downwards. Before it was released, NASA inverted the photo to fit expectations of what the Earth looks like on maps.
There have been tentative efforts to change this paradigm, but few from New Zealand itself, even though it has the most to gain (with the possible exception of Australia, which – like Africa – is much larger than it gets credit for, and occasionally loses Tasmania on maps).
One elegant solution is to simply present standard maps upside down.
In technical terms, this is called a ‘‘south-up map orientation’’. Many of these maps focus on the antemeridian – the opposite of the prime meridian – which happens to be off the coast of New Zealand.
The most famous of these is called the McArthur projection, designed by an Australian in 1979. It does not, however, correct for the distortions of the Mercator Projection. Flipping an equal area projection would give the best of both worlds.
To improve it further, centring the map on the Pacific cleanly divides the globe in equal parts; the Americas to the left, Asia/Pacific in the middle, and Africa and Europe to the right.
It can be confusing at first, even unsettling, which shows how skewed our view of the world has become.
It leads to an interesting thought experiment. What if New Zealand became the first country in which maps were, by convention, presented upside down?
Nothing else changes. New Zealand would still be a southern nation, on the edge of the Southern Ocean in the south Pacific. South is simply at the top.
Instead of going on holiday ‘‘up north’’ or ‘‘down south’’, we’d go down north or up south. Travelling Down Under would lead one to Great Britain.
It makes some intuitive sense. The Ma¯ ori name for the North Island, Te Ika a Ma¯ ui, is from the story of Ma¯ ui catching a giant fish, which formed the island.
On a standard map, the North Island has no discernable shape. Flip it upside down – as it would have appeared when explored by Ma¯ ori from Polynesia on their southward migration – and it looks like something with a tail, two fins and a mouth.
Turn the whole country around, and it strongly resembles a kiwi, dipping its beak.
New Zealand is not the only beneficiary. Traditional maps have an effect called ‘‘continental drip’’ (a play on continental drift). For reasons that remain unclear – but are likely just coincidence – southward pointing landforms tend to sag, which makes it look as though the continents are melting. When inverted, the world looks more like a jagged, mountainous peak.
In an era where information is easily distributed, there is no need for standardised world maps. Countries should be free to use maps that centre their own part of the world, rather than that of a long-distant empire.
In an abstract sense, there’s evidence suggesting inverting maps could help us see ourselves in a more positive light.
Research in the social sciences has found an implicit bias towards things that are ‘‘north’’ or ‘‘up’’, compared to ‘‘south’’ or ‘‘down’’.
In one study, students chose where they would like to live in a fictional city, represented by a plain circle: Most chose somewhere north. Another study placed coffee cups on three vertically positioned shelves, and participants were asked to rate their favourites: they consistently chose cups on higher shelves. People implicitly associate God with up and the Devil with down.
It’s even encoded in our language. To ‘‘feel down’’ is bad, but to ‘‘cheer up’’ is good. Life has its ups and downs, and you want more of the former.
Inverting maps corrects – or, at least, disrupts – these psychological prejudices based on direction. What would it do to our mental maps if our physical maps put us at the centre of the world?
In a time when New Zealand is refocusing its curriculum on the impacts of colonisation, the standard world map – itself a product of colonisation, which privileges a European view at the expense of a New Zealand one – seems an obvious relic.
Flipping our maps upside down is one way to position Aotearoa as an independent nation capable of telling its own story.
People implicitly associate God with up and the Devil with down. It’s even encoded in our language. To ‘‘feel down’’ is bad, but to ‘‘cheer up’’ is good.