Why All World Maps are Wrong

This might challenge your worldview, but all maps you know are wrong! Hopefully you’re not easily spooked, because this article will explain why the maps you put all your faith in can’t actually be trusted.

Mercator Projection

To start with, let’s start with the classic world map we all know and love. There’s only one problem, though; that isn’t what the world looks like. The Mercator Projection is perhaps the most common map in the world and was originally designed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. While our modern version has obviously been updated since the original, the general shape and design is still very similar.

There’s only one problem, though, and it’s a biggie; the shape. The thing is, maps like that represent our world which is a three-dimensional globe, on a two-dimensional plane. That means the land masses are inflated horizontally towards the North and South pole, and vertically close to the equator. So, land masses on a flat map don’t accurately reflect their real size in fact, it’s difficult to accurately do so at all.

A great example of that is Greenland. For hundreds of years, Greenland has loomed over the rest of the world like a giant, frozen bully. On the Mercator Projection, it’s big enough to consume the entirety of South America while still having room for a little United Kingdom snack. In reality, however, South America is around 6.87 million square miles while Greenland is only around 836,000, making South America over eight times larger. You can compare the two side by side in the image below.

And as you can see, the difference is striking Greenland is absolutely tiny! So, if the Mercator Projection is so inaccurate why do we still use it? For starters, it’s useful for navigation in fact, that’s what it was first created for. Despite not showing landmass accurately, it does represent distance and angles well. A straight line from Florida to Argentina, for example, will accurately depict the curved path you’d actually take.

So, Gerardus was pretty good in that regard. Some of his other maps like this one below, depicting the North Pole are less accurate. But that isn’t what he’s known for, he's known for his world map.

The problem with translating a three-dimensional globe to a two-dimensional plane, though doesn’t have a solution. There are creative alternatives, but they all have their own drawbacks. For example, the Galls-Peters Projection, and it can be a little jarring at first. It focuses on presenting the area of different landmasses accurately, Greenland is appropriately tiny, as you will see.

However, it can only accomplish that by stretching and distorting their shapes. Then there’s that fun one, the Dymaxion Projection. The idea behind that map is that all those individual jagged pieces fold together. The video below reveals how they look converging and back:

HD DynamicDymaxion by StevenMcQ

While that allows the dymaxion map to represent size and shape well, it’s not a great representation of distance. For instance, looking at that thing can you tell how far apart all the continents are at a glance? It’s fine if you fold it up, but at that point why not just look at a globe?

Miller Projection

The Miller Projection was created by Osborne Maitland Miller in 1942. Rather than an entirely new projection, it uses Mercator as a basis and simply tries to tweak some things. Landmasses are closer to an accurate representation of their size and shape, though land north of the equator is still a bit bigger than it should be. So, next time you try to point out a country on a map, remember that in reality, your finger might be off by a few hundred miles.

Size and Proportions

If you think Greenland was the worst offender on the Mercator Projection, you haven't seen anything yet. For example Africa, and if the Mercator Projection is to be believed, it’s pretty big. A little bigger than South America, but snugly fitting within Eurasia.

Africa might be the most shafted continent on the map, because the Mercator projection does not do it justice. The USA and Africa compared to the continent in the Mercator Projection is bigger, sure, but the USA seems to span a good stretch of it. The image below reveals how the USA compares to Africa accurately. Africa could wear the US like a backpack!

The United States of America measures in at a little over 3.61 million square miles, which is pretty large for a single country. In fact, that makes it the fourth largest country by area after Russia, China, and Canada. Africa, however, measures in at a whopping 11.7 million miles including islands like Madagascar. That’s over three times the size of the USA!

Let’s go ahead and throw the third largest country, Canada, into the mix as well. The entirety of North America compared to Africa definitely stacks up better, and is a little harder to eyeball due to all of Canada’s islands and wispy peninsulas. Africa is still bigger, however, as all of North America only measures in at 9,540,000 square miles.

In fact, within Africa’s mighty borders, you can comfortably fit China, the USA, India, Spain, France, Germany and even if we throw in all of Eastern Europe, there’s still room! Even the largest country, Russia, still only has a total area of 6.6 million square miles, a bit over half Africa’s landmass.

After learning all that you will never be able to see the globe like before. Are any other countries that distorted? Is the UK actually the size of the USA? Thankfully it’s not the case. Britain is actually about 40% smaller than it appears on the Mercator Projection! The Northern and Southern extremities of the map are stretched. So the further from the equator a landmass is, the more it’s distorted. Africa, straddling the equator, is left relatively unaltered.

In the opposite extreme, however, we have Antarctica. Looking at the Mercator Projection, the continent appears absolutely enormous, like a huge wall of ice that takes up the bottom third of the globe. In actuality, Antarctica only appears that way due to its position at the very bottom of the map. Here’s how the continent would look if it were in the Pacific Ocean.

Still big, but hardly the behemoth it appears on the Mercator Projection. The icy continent measures in at 5.5 million square miles, and as you have seen above, that makes it much smaller than North America’s 9.5 million square miles, or South America’s 6.87 million square miles.

Maps Without New Zealand

It might surprise that many commercially available maps are completely missing the nation of New Zealand. How is that possible, though? While the island nation is fairly small and out of the way, it still boasts a population greater than Ireland and a land mass larger than the United Kingdom and you'll never see a map without any of the British Isles!

If you look through online, you will notice that even Western Kentucky University forgetting New Zealand, Amazon forgetting New Zealand, Pyongyang Airport forgetting New Zealand, the Simpsons forgetting New Zealand, Domino’s Pizza forgetting New Zealand, Risk: Legacy forgetting New Zealand, and in case it couldn’t get any worse, the New Zealand Government’s own website forgetting New Zealand.

Sometimes, even when New Zealand is included in maps, it’s mislabeled, like when Russia Today mistook the country for Japan. While they’re both island nations, they’re nearly 6,000 miles apart! In 2019, IKEA had to publicly apologize and recall an entire line of maps that excluded New Zealand and if you think those are all the examples, you’re mistaken; there’s an entire subreddit dedicated to cataloguing maps that forget the poor country.

So, what gives? Is there a cartographer conspiracy theory that New Zealand doesn’t exist? The current leading theory is good old-fashioned laziness sprinkled with a touch of ignorance. Most maps use the Mercator projection, which is a map projection that puts Europe in the center. That leaves New Zealand towards the bottom right, meaning one can easily forget the island when cropping, copying, or pasting an image.

That sounds reasonable. But it doesn’t explain why so many maps also forget Madagascar! That African island is over twice the size of the UK, is more populous than Greece and Sweden combined, and is a stone’s throw away from Mozambique! How can we keep forgetting island nations from maps?

Center of the World

Have you ever been accused of thinking you were the center of the world? If we wanted to pin down the actual center of the world, though, we’d need to break out our old friend the Mercator Projection. While it’s hard to pin down perfectly, the country that seems most central in the Mercator Projection is The Democratic Republic of Congo.

That isn’t necessarily because map-makers are Congolese supremacists, but because it fairly evenly aligns the continents into two regions, with the Americas on the left and Africa, Eurasia, and Oceania on the right. However, that alignment of landmasses is also totally arbitrary. As previously discussed, our Earth is a globe, meaning you can easily swivel the center of focus around without any loss in accuracy.

For example, the GIF below shows what the world map would look like if we’d decided to position the Americas to the East and the rest of the world to the West.

Kind of like looking into bizarro world but in reality, that is our world! We just don’t think of it that way. As another example, there’s a Chinese world map that places a great focus on Asia. However, maps like that look more like they’re making Australia the center of attention. The map below, by reddit user Paradoxical Cabbage, places New Zealand in the center.

If you want to play around with re-centering the world map, there’s a fun tool called Country-Centered Map Projections that lets you do just that. If you’ve ever been tried for international war crimes, you may also be familiar with a projection of the world map, known as a polar azimuthal equidistant projection. That projection is the basis for the emblem of the United Nations, as it doesn’t clearly prioritize any individual nation or continent.

There are even wackier examples, too. There is the South-Up map, which places the South of the world up, towards the top of the map. Weird but it makes the very interesting point that we think of our three-dimensional world in a very two-dimensional way. After all, from space, you could easily be looking at the world from an angle like this!

Astronauts Describe Seeing Earth From Space by ScienceAtNASA

Old Maps

Even if it’s a little funky, it’s hard not to look at the Mercator Projection and take it as a given. It’s so burned into our minds it can be hard to imagine a world without it, but once, there was! Mapmaking or cartography has existed much, much longer than that imperfect projection.

In The Story of Maps, Lloyd Brown calls cartography the oldest variety of primitive art and that makes sense. After all, one of the first things early man would have sought to represent was their surroundings. That is the Pavlov map, the earliest known map in history. If you can believe it, that ancient map dates back to 25,000 BCE.

25 thousand years, meaning it was carved towards the end of the Pleistocene era, also known as the Ice Age. Fittingly, it’s carved into the tusk of a woolly mammoth. Found in 1962 amidst the Pavlov Hills in modern-day Czechia, the tusk features a beautiful and enigmatic carving which you can see replicated in the image below.

That was first theorized to be a map by Masaryk University’s Bohuslav Klima. The map was likely used by hunters to depict the surrounding area, so as hard as it is to believe, those beautiful carvings represent what was once central Europe. Things must have changed a bit since then.

Jumping forward an astonishing 24,400 years and we find the Imago Mundi, the oldest known map of the world, dating all the way back to the ancient city of Babylon in the 6th Century BCE.

The map depicts Babylon on the bank of the Euphrates, surrounded by eight circles believed to represent different regions such as Assyria. Around those is a ring representing the ocean, and beyond the ring are eight triangles representing further regions of the world. It leaves a lot to the imagination, sure, but considering the map was carved over 2000 years before the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1522, they didn’t have much to work with.

Jumping forward a few hundred years we find the Posidonius Map, reconstructed in 1628. Originally created by its namesake Posidonius, who lived between 135 and 51 BCE, the map depicts the known world to Posidonius including Europe, North Africa, Arabia, and parts of Asia.

Even there we can see the world moving on from the idea the world is flat in fact, Posidonius himself used the position of the star Canopus to theorize the circumference of the Earth was around 24,000 miles. Shockingly close to the actual circumference of 24,901 miles.

In fact, around 100 years before Posidonius, the Greek polymath Eratosthenes theorized the Earth’s circumference to be between 24,270 and 25,050 miles, which is a margin of error between 2.4 and 0.8 percent! Hard to believe we figured that out over 2000 years ago, and there are still flat-earthers out there today.

What’s A Map?

What is a map? It’s harder to answer than you might think. Though most try to depict reality objectively, some are subject to artistry and cultural influence and with that in mind, a map can take more unconventional forms than you might think.

An interesting example of that comes in the form of Australian Aboriginal songlines. Those complex songs and dances recount the journeys of mythical creator-beings across Australia. The lyrics of the songs refer to various real-world locations and landmarks, which if recited can be used by a knowledgeable person to navigate the land.

In visual form, songlines take on a multitude of artistic symbols and patterns that represent those different geographical points. Pretty far removed from the Mercator Projection. Some songlines can even represent areas of over 2,000 miles! And astonishingly, they were used. Anthropologists have documented individuals successfully navigating hundreds of miles through the unforgiving Australian outback with nothing but a songline to guide them.

While it’s difficult to ascertain just how old songlines are, one was recently found to accurately reference the location of two bodies of water that dried up over 7,000 years ago in its lyrics. But songlines aren’t the only super unconventional way of mapping. Check out the Native American Catawba map below, which is drawn on deerskin.

That map doesn’t seek to represent geography at all. Instead, each circle represents a different indigenous group in the South Carolina region. Squares meanwhile represent Europeans, and the size of each shape the population of the areas. In that way, it’s almost like a modern subway map.

Instead of geography, the Catawba map is a map of diplomacy, mapping out relationships over space. There's also a drawing of a Native American map from 1825 similarly doesn’t measure the land in terms of distance, but time, mapping out how long it takes to journey between different places and what could occur along the way.

Finally, met the Ammassalik carvings in the image below. Those three-dimensional wooden carvings are the work of the Tunumiit people from back in the 1880s. The wooden carvings are meant to represent the shape and proportional size of the coast of Greenland, which the Tunumiit call their home. Those maps in particular were carved by a hunter named Kunit in 1885.

Google Map Inaccuracies

While some maps are incorrect due to honest mistakes, a lack of information, or the difficulties of mapmaking in general, others are a little more nefarious. Some maps are wrong, on purpose. For example, in 1906 explorer Robert Peary collaborated with the San Francisco Call to create a map. On the map you may notice there’s an entirely new continent there called Crocker Land, which sounds like the most boring theme park ever.

Peary claimed to have discovered the landmass and named it after the wealthy banker who happened to be funding his expeditions, George Crocker. Clearly, Peary believed the discovery of a new continent named after his benefactor would open their pockets a little more.

Of course, Crocker Land was a crock of old baloney. Outside of personal gain, maps can also be censored or edited for political reasons. One such example is this map in the image below, depicting the non-existent nation of Kurdistan.

While that might look harmless, posting it could be enough to get you banned on certain social media. According to former censor at Facebook Amine Derkaoui, the map was a secret violation of Facebook censorship standards not included in the regular community guidelines.

The reason? Well, to abbreviate history; the Kurds make up an ethnic group in the Middle East. After the first World War, they ended up without a country of their own as the former Ottoman Empire negotiated land division with the Brits. That map depicts a theoretical Kurdistan, had it been founded, but as that would involve taking away land from Turkey, posting it could land you in hot water.

Another huge issue with map accuracy comes when they need to depict disputed territories. One example is that of Kashmir, a region claimed by both India and Pakistan. As neither nation will budge on the claim, mapmakers need to make a decision when it comes to depicting the borders of the region.

How do they handle that? Well, Google will change their results depending on who’s looking. That’s right, Google literally redraws the map. If you view the region from Pakistan, Kashmir appears with a dotted line depicting its disputed nature. If you view the region from India, however, the region is fully within the nation’s borders.

Even the USA isn’t immune to that, and has contested boundaries with Canada, the Bahamas, and Cuba to name a few. Of course, political influence on mapmaking can be just as silly as it is complex. Former Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney got Google Maps to censor his house from their platform, replacing the building with blurry pixels.

Thankfully it’s uncensored now if you ever want to pretend you’re a bird taking a midair dump on it. As it turns out, though, Google Maps frequently blur, edit, or censor areas of their maps on request. The Marcoule Nuclear Site in France appears as a group of pixels, as does their Montlucon Prison.

It can be easy to view maps uncritically as depictions of reality. However, at the end of the day, maps are still made by people that are susceptible to bias and political pressure. Either that, or France is currently turning their prisoners into atomic super-soldiers and is covering up the evidence!

Weird Maps

So far, we’ve learned how art, culture, and politics can redraw the world. Sometimes, however, maps are just wrong. Take the Korean world map from 1402, for instance. That weird blob above is supposed to represent the whole world. In the center is an amalgamation of China and India, Korea with a mirrored Japan underneath, for some reason. There is also Africa, with Europe above it. Quite unrecognizable, but, it’s likely just a matter of priorities.

There are more artistic maps like, the Fool’s Face Map, and it depicts the world as we know it ghoulishly plastered over the face of a jester. It was created sometime after 1587, but nobody knows by whom. Around the face are various Latin phrases such as the number of fools is infinite and "vanity, vanity, all is vanity".

That suggests that the map was intended as some kind of satirical statement, that either the world itself is foolish, or our attempts to understand it are foolish and egotistical. It’s at least higher effort than today’s political cartoons. The map itself doesn’t look too inaccurate for the 16th Century either, which is more than can be said for this next one in the image below-

What landmass do you think it’s depicting? Some Greek island? Maybe a sideways Jamaica? Madagascar on the wrong side of Africa? No, that is actually a map of Baja California, which if you aren’t aware, isn’t an island! The reason for that cartoonish cartography comes down to simple laziness.

When California was first chartered in 1533 by the Spanish, they didn’t actually bother to charter it. They simply arrived, assumed it was an island, and went about their business. Amazingly, that mistake persisted for another 200 years.

In fact, California actually takes its name from a Spanish work of fiction about a mythical island named California. It wasn’t until the Spanish explorer Juan de Anza decided to literally walk from Arizona to California in 1775 that the world finally caught on. Last but not least, let's explor the Map of Our Square and Stationary Earth by Professor Orlando Ferguson in 1893.

It's from 1893, which is 2133 years after Eratosthenes proved the Earth is round! The Greeks posited the world is spherical in 240 BCE, which was information inherited by the Romans, which then spread throughout Europe. Despite popular misconceptions, by the Early Middle Ages the belief in a spherical Earth was widespread.

So how did we end up with that? Ferguson was a die-hard Christian, and he seemed to think the Bible made it clear the Earth was flat. To make sense of that, he placed the continents in the middle of a mold, with the ocean around it inside a large crater of ice. Modern flat-Earthers, really seem to believe in a similar set-up with the continents in the middle and an expansive plane of ice on the perimeter.

I hope you were amazed at our journey around the world of cartography and all these crazy maps! Thanks for reading.