Name: Why every world map is wrong - Kayla Wolf
Uploaded: 2021-04-19T21:01:20.000Z
Duration: 4 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

but you wouldn't guess it from most maps of the world.

The fact is, every world map humans have ever made is wrong.

Actually, it's impossible to make a map of the world 100% right.

No, not you, globe, we know you're accurate.

Not you, Google Earth, you're just a digital globe.

We're talking about flat maps, which, let's face it, are way more convenient for a lot of things.

it's impossible to make a 100% accurate flat map of a spherical planet.

They just plonked places down in arbitrary locations without any consistent scale.

Then in 150 AD, the Greek mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy systematically mapped the Earth on a grid

and placed locations on the grid according to coordinates,

so maps could be checked against others and replicated.

Ptolemy built his grid out of lines we still use today:

180 lines of latitude and 360 lines of longitude.

In spite of these advances, people kept getting lost.

Part of the problem was a, shall we say, incomplete understanding of the world's geography.

But it was also just really difficult to navigate using a map.

The shortest route from one place to another is a path along a circle.

it passes through every line of longitude at a different angle.

To follow the route, you'd have to constantly shift the direction you're traveling.

Any slight error would land you in the wrong place.

In 1569, Gerardus Mercator fixed this problem.

so these curved navigational routes would be straight,

passing through every line of longitude at the same angle

and therefore allowing navigators to set a constant bearing.

In other words, travel in one direction for a whole journey.

To do this, he had to distort land masses and bodies of water

so those furthest from the equator got larger

In spite of its inaccuracies, Mercator's map was very useful.

In fact, it's still widely used today, including in online maps.

In 1925, the Goode Homolosine Projection was created as, get this,

an interrupted pseudo-cylindrical equal area projection.

The point was to minimize distortion for the entire world.

The map can be land-oriented or ocean-oriented.

Either way, the so-called orange peel map isn't very easy to read.

The Dymaxion Projection by American architect Buckminster Fuller in the 1940s is even better.

It's not better if you want to understand where things are in the world.

It is better in the sense that there are no visibly evident distortions of the land masses.

Though if you wanted to know, say, how far Brazil is from Nigeria,

you won't get any sense of that from this map.

The most accurate projection to date is the AuthaGraph World Map

designed by Japanese architect Hajime Narukawa in 1999.

The continents and oceans are almost completely in proportion,

and the map is rectangular, just how we like it.

Since the Mercator works for navigation and reads clearly,

Arno Peters argued that by enlarging European and North American countries,

the Mercator projection gives white nations a sense of supremacy over non-white nations closer to the equator.

He adapted the Gall-Peters Projection, which counteracts that particular problem,

but the continents are still... stretched.

Today, we rely on maps less and less for navigation,

but they still play a vital role in education.

it's a story told from the perspective of the map's creator

that in turn shapes, perhaps unduly, our perception of our world.

Simple changes in map design, even changes that have nothing to do with how we transfer a round Earth to a flat surface,