All maps necessarily lie to you. The world is a slightly flattened sphere with our contents emerging from beneath waters that flow in a continuous circuit around the globe. It is simply impossible to unwrap the surface of the near-spherical Earth and lay it out as a flat sheet. If you doubt this, try carefully peeling an orange and laying out the peelings in a single, flat piece.
Maps That Prove You Don't Really Know Earth - from YouTube
An animated video about cartography
[Music plays throughout - no voiceover]
The challenge of portraying on a flat surface the essentially spherical shape of our planet has puzzled cartographers for centuries. The job cannot be done without distortion and this is demonstrated beautifully on this page of map projection transitions. Every cartographer (map maker) has to decide what features they wish to accurately preserve and then adjust the projection to fit. One aspect gets faithfully reproduced, and all else is a compromise. This short video demonstrates some of the surprising effects the popular Mercator projection has on the way we perceive the world.
The best known world map that you will have seen everywhere on Geography classroom walls is likely the projection by Gerardus Mercator (formerly Gerhard Kremer) from 1568. Mercator's projection allows you to plot directions anywhere on it without having to correct for the curvature of the Earth, making it ideal for navigation. To achieve this, Mercator mapped the surface of the world onto a cylinder, straightening all the parallels of latitude and longitude (the faint vertical and horizontal lines traversing the map) and making all the horizontal lines of latitude the same length as the Equator. The downside to this way of mapping the world is that the lines that would have converged to a point at the top and bottom of the globe have been stretched out, increasingly distorting the size and shape of continents the further they are from the Equator.
This has the unfortunate side-effect of shrinking the size of the world's poorer continents. Africa appears diminutive compared to the exaggerated size of Greenland. The Peterson projection accurately shows the relative surface area of different continents, at a cost of distorting the angles, making it good for marvelling at the relative size of land masses, but not for navigation.
As ever, we must reach for the right tool - the right map - for the purpose in hand, and bear in mind every projection has its limitations.
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