Читать книгу The State of the World Atlas [ff] - Dan Smith - Страница 17

THE PROBLEM WITH MAPS

The aim of this atlas is to look at the world through the lens of world

problems. That means mapping those issues onto the world – and there we

encounter the standard problem of atlases. Because the world is virtually a

sphere, it cannot be accurately depicted on a flat, rectangular piece of paper.

Peel an orange and flatten out the skin and the problem is immediately

understandable. Choices and compromises must accordingly be made –

choices, essentially, about how to be inaccurate. These choices are packaged

into the projection of the world that is utilised in drawing the map.

The most widely seen world maps use projections that retain the shapes

of the continents and islands, and therefore wildly distort their size. The

first and most famous of these projections is the one developed by the

16th-century Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator. Using that projection,

the sizes of regions far from the equator are exaggerated. Thus Europe looks

bigger than it is, while China and India look smaller. The most notorious

distortion of area in Mercator is that Greenland looks similar in size to

Africa, which is actually 14 times bigger than Greenland. Mercator’s choice of

projection was determined in part by his wish, as the sub-title of the original

atlas put it, to produce an aid for navigators. Navigation was at the forefront

of Europe’s advance into the world from the 15th through the 18th centuries.

It was the scientific precondition for sailing to far-flung destinations for trade

and conquest.

There have been numerous attempts over succeeding centuries to correct the

illustrative weakness in the Mercator projection. The best known today is the

one proposed in 1973 by Arno Peters, drawing on work in the 19th century

by a Scottish clergyman, James Gall. The Peters or Gall-Peters projection

is more accurate on the size of different regions but distorts the world’s

appearance in other ways. There are geographers who believe the depiction

of the world on rectangular pieces of paper should be stopped.

The projection employed in this atlas makes a different set of choices and

compromises. It is the Winkel’s Tripel, first used in 1913, compromising

between the three elements of area, direction, and distance. Distortion is

not completely eliminated but is minimized. The curved lines of latitude and

longitude make the projection

useless for navigators, but the

result is fairer and reasonably

familiar, especially since it was

adopted by the US National

Geographic Society in 1998.

Below: Myriad's

world map based

on the Winkel

Tripel projection,

and a cartogram

based on

population size.

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