The world map is familiar sight on classroom walls and in atlases, but in terms of country and continent size, it’s way off – and all because of a 16th-century projection.

Peters pointed out that the Mercator map has a distortion in the northern hemisphere, making North American and Eurasian countries appear much larger than they actually are.

For centuries, the Mercator map – one of the most widely used world maps – has shrunk the African continent, distorting its scale and minimising its global significance. Africa covers 30,37-million ...

For example, Europe looks larger than it is and Africa smaller, which has led to criticism that the Mercator worldview helped prime the minds of European imperialists in the 19th century. Greenland is ...

Commentary Comment: Can we blame Mercator for Trump’s Greenland obsession? To simplify his map, the cartographer drew Greenland as immense, when it’s smaller than Algeria. Wednesday, April 2 ...

Named after Gerardus Mercator, the Flemish geographer who designed this map in the 16th century, this projection shows meridians as parallel lines, which made the picture simple to display on ...

Peters pointed out that the Mercator map has a distortion in the northern hemisphere, making North American and Eurasian countries appear much larger than they actually are.

The Mercator Projection is the name for the distortion in mapping that inflates the size of lands the further they get from the equator. Jakub Nowosad/Licensed Under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 ...

Drawing inspiration from the Robinson projection map of 1963, which gained approval from the National Geographic Society in 1988, the Equal Earth projection offers a fresh solution. This new map ...