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The Earth is Flat! (on maps)

Bennett Sherry

This past Friday, the United Nations voted nearly unanimously to end a travesty that has haunted our world for five centuries: The Mercator Projection. (Please don't ask me to tell you how I really feel). 

Maps and the labels on them have been in the news a lot lately. The names of various bodies of water and land seem to be less immutable than middle school geography led us to believe. Ask any elementary school student in Michigan who learned HOMES for the Great Lakes and now has to change the pneumonic to SHAME. Well, the UN decided to get in on the geography revisionism game too. By a vote of 164-to-1 (with 5 abstentions), the General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution to move away from the Mercator Projection. The resolution was championed by 54 African nations who would like their continent to look bigger than Greenland, thank-you-very-much. The lone “No” vote came from the United States.

Of course, the ways that maps show landmasses has a big impact on the ways students learn about the world. And because it’s tough to flatten an oblate spheroid into a 2d surface, all projections involve some compromise. At the very least, students should know that cartographers make choices and those choices have real-world consequences. OER Project maps use the Miller cylindrical projection, which is a compromise that shows the whole world on one neat sheet while reducing the extreme polar distortions of the Mercator projection.

As always, there’s an XKCD comic for this situation.* Please tag yourself and your favored projection in the comments! (I’m Gall-Peters. No, I will not be taking questions.)

*XKCD does a whole “bad map projections” series. They’d make for some fun wall art in your classroom: “Madagascator”; “The Greenland Special”; “Longitude=ABS(Longitude)”.

  • I’m glad you included this topic  , because I recently discussed it with my AP Human Geography class. The African Union had been advocating for this change in map projection for some time, and it is exciting to see that it has finally become a reality.

  • I’m a fan of the Gall-Peters projection as well—if only for the simple reason that it's aesthetically pleasing and was famously featured in an episode of The West Wing (Season 2, Episode 16, for anyone who wants to check it out!).

    Map projections are always a hot topic in AP Human Geography, but they’re fantastic historical tools for any classroom. Examining the intentional goals—and inevitable distortions—of different projections can lead to some really rich discussions in any world history or social studies course.

     , do your students ever ask which course you prefer teaching: Human Geo or World History? Personally, I don't think I could ever choose—they're both fantastic!

  • in reply to April Williams

     yes, that is actually a question my students often ask me, and, like you, I find it very difficult to choose. I am passionate about all the courses I teach because I genuinely find each of them fascinating. Perhaps I am lucky to have a profession that allows me to teach what I love.

    I also think my background as a geographer has shaped the way I teach. Geography is sometimes questioned as not having a defined object of study, and perhaps as a result, geographers are trained to think across disciplines and look for connections among different subjects. That interdisciplinary way of thinking comes naturally to me, so I tend to approach my teaching through an intersectional lens. History, geography, culture, anthropology, economics, politics, science, are rarely separate in the real world—and I love helping students see those connections.