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The UN challenges five centuries of cartography

57 points speckx 10 hours ago 74 comments

AlexandrB 10 hours ago | parent

What's the material difference between this and Trump's "my button is bigger"[1] nonsense or the renaming of various bodies of water? I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

My personal favourite equal-area projection is something like Boggs eumorphic[2] because it doesn't distort the east and westmost polar regions quite as badly. The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand, not whether it flatters the correct countries.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42549687

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boggs_eumorphic_projection

dgellow 9 hours ago | parent

The main difference is that the UN didn’t force anything and isn’t unilaterally deciding what projection to use. The countries decided together to use a new default when showing the world map, that’s it. You can still use whatever projection you want, nothing will happen to you.

> it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

That’s literally what the UN is for. The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts. It’s a forum for countries to discuss and agree on things, in practice that means mostly symbolic decisions pass. Which is fine, symbols and defaults matter

Muromec 9 hours ago | parent

>The UN isn’t a supranational organization fixing conflicts.

It kinda is, it also have powers to authorize invasions. Not that any of this works in practice, but that's what is for.

hn993302 5 hours ago | parent

Trump didn't unilaterally decide what the rest of the world calls two bodies of water, only the US

neuronexmachina 9 hours ago | parent

> I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

This is kind of personally embarrassing, but due to seeing Mercator maps all the time growing up it wasn't until later in life that I realized that Greenland isn't actually a gigantic landmass the size of Africa.

> The value of a geographic projection is in its utility for the task at hand

Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.

jubilanti 9 hours ago | parent

I'd bet a lot of money that Trump and all the others pushing for a U.S. "liberation" of Greenland also think it is a similar size to Africa, not 1/14th the size.

Africa is 14x larger, but near the same size on the maps our leaders have grown up with for 80+ years.

This has clearly influenced geopolitics. Which is the point of the UN. Which is just a container for what the countries of the world want to agree on. When the UN "doesn't work" for some thing it is because the countries of the world don't want to work together for that thing.

tekla 9 hours ago | parent

> This has clearly influenced geopolitics

Citation needed. This feels like the entire hubub from leftists about how schools use the normal map because of racism and not because its actually useful.

Of course they were lying the entire time.

dnautics 9 hours ago | parent

> many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.

What sort of tasks besides a size measuring contest is an equal area projection good for?

hn993302 5 hours ago | parent

Besides size, there's distance. Like it's annoying how UK and France look much further apart than they actually are, and every sea/air route appears to not take the shortest path. I'd be fine with this change if it weren't about trying to make Africa look more important. They're just fixing a misleading map.

neuronexmachina 1 hour ago | parent

It's worth noting that Equal Earth isn't an equidistant projection. The upper bound on distance distortion is an order of magnitude less than Mercator's though.

rmunn 28 minutes ago | parent

> Other than maritime navigation, I can't think of many tasks where Mercator would be more useful than an equal-area projection.

Precisely why, I suspect, the US voted against the change. (One of the reasons, at least) I mean, gee, I wonder why the country with the world's largest navy* would prefer maps where you can draw a line on the map between two points and it's the actual compass direction? (Give or take a bit of weirdness near the poles, where the difference between the Earth's rotational pole and its magnetic pole actually matters in a way it doesn't matter below the polar circles).

It's just a symbolic vote, of course, and nobody's navy is going to stop using the so-useful-for-maritime-navigation Mercator just because of this UN vote. But still, I would bet that factored into the reasoning. How much? Who knows, I certainly couldn't say. Except to suspect that it was a non-trivial factor.

* Largest by tonnage — China and Russia have more total ships, with the US in third place by ship count, but the US has nearly half the number of aircraft carriers in the entire world, 11 out of a total of 23, and aircraft carriers are some of the heaviest ships out there. Numbers are from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-n...

erxam 9 hours ago | parent

It's not the most pressing issue in the world, but long-term, maps do shape conceptions about the world that we don't personally know. So it might be symbolic, but symbols are powerful.

EA-3167 9 hours ago | parent

That must be why we all live in awe and fear of giant, mighty Greenland.

erxam 9 hours ago | parent

The fact that Greenland looks so big and impressive in a Mercator map has probably influenced Trump's obsession with taking it on some level.

sb057 9 hours ago | parent

>I know the UN claims that "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation." but it's purely symbolic and changes nothing geopolitically.

Symbols are arguably the most important aspect of geopolitics.

EA-3167 9 hours ago | parent

Yeah… the US condemnations of the Axis powers is what really turned the tide, joining into the war later was really a post-script right?

neuronexmachina 9 hours ago | parent

Counterpoint: the Cold War was pretty much all about geopolitical symbols, e.g. the Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals.

tekla 9 hours ago | parent

> Berlin Wall, nuclear deterrence, the Space Race, counting Olympic medals

I'm sure the guns trained on people trying to cross the Berlin wall to the west was just a "symbol", or the nuclear tests to prove that superpowers could kill everyone, or the people who died during the space race to send someone to the Moon. Olympics, sure whatever.

Yes, a nonbinding UN resolution that does a stupid thing that no one has to care about is a symbol, just one no one cares about because its nonbinding.

poncho_romero 8 hours ago | parent

To some people the Berlin Wall was an immediate and terrible factor in their lives. But to most people in the world, it was a symbol of oppression rather than a physical manifestation of it.

Muromec 9 hours ago | parent

Except the part where had to lift an old mainframe from that frozen shithole with a helicopter under fire. And like 10 different proxy wars that are still going on.

watwut 8 hours ago | parent

Nazi were big on symbols. And very good in their use of them for propaganda. Yes, they played role in getting support for their project.

And allies were engaged in that too.

frieseke 9 hours ago | parent

The UN is a body that is intended to facilitate global cooperation. This symbolic change better represents the body's members and updates an incorrect visualization, which leads to better cooperation and representation.

Trump's renaming changes serve his own whims and selfish ego, they perform the opposite effect and hinder global cooperation.

lukeschlather 1 hour ago | parent

For the purposes I use world maps for, correct relative sizing is the paramount thing I'm looking for in a projection. I generally use it to give me a rough idea of distances. Boggs seems inferior, at a glance I have no idea how far it is from NYC to London, for example. I feel like Mercator is similarly bad in terms of distances being uniform. What do you use maps for where Boggs is superior?

rkagerer 9 hours ago | parent

It's great they want to find a projection that better represents the real geography, but at the end of the day you're still trying to unwrap a sphere onto a rectangle. Personally I feel the schools mentioned here would get better mileage out of buying (more) old fashioned globes, and encouraging the kids to learn geography that way.

kspacewalk2 9 hours ago | parent

Robinson projection is a good enough, boring compromise, if the UN was interested in that.

tensor 9 hours ago | parent

No one needs a compromise. The world (except the US) agreed to use this new map together. It's not a conflict.

mdp2021 9 hours ago | parent

Somebody who does not represent anybody "agreed" - not us.

tensor 9 hours ago | parent

I'm Canadian. Canada represents me. They voted on this. That's how the world works. Sometimes my government is not the one I voted for and my interests are not represented, or sometimes my interests are not the majority in my country. That's life.

No one is forcing you to use the new map, you can keep your old map. No one will arrest you for it. Enjoy!

nisegami 9 hours ago | parent

Representing a 3D sphere-like surface on a 2d plane definitionally requires compromise.

jsLavaGoat 9 hours ago | parent

"The world" is not represented by the UN General Assembly. Did you vote for your representative?

raincole 9 hours ago | parent

The UN does not dictate which map you or your government or your school or Google uses.

Muromec 9 hours ago | parent

I didn't vote for a foreign minister of my country, but his job is to represent my country, including in UN. This is fine.

kspacewalk2 8 hours ago | parent

To say that "the world agreed" on something based on a General Assembly resolution is an interesting claim, if rather bold.

sgc 29 minutes ago | parent

One can still note a poor decision based on its merits.

An equal area projection map is obviously valuable. But it's practically asinine to pick a projection that distorts land features when there are several equal area projections that do not.

Further, Ukraine had to abstain from this vote because they shoehorned in something ridiculous considering the official position of the UN members that Crimea is Ukraine [1], and Crimea is depicted as outside of Ukraine.

I have no idea if there are other hidden yet important changes, since there is hardly any commentary apart from size and shape.

[1] https://ukraine-war-analytics.com/history/international-reco...

bawolff 7 minutes ago | parent

UNGA votes are non binding symbolic grandstanding. This vote does not mean the world agreed to it. its more like the world agreed to think about it.

Will countries actually change their map projections? That has yet to be seen. Maybe they will, maybe they won't That has yet to be seen.

atoav 9 hours ago | parent

Why would the world feel the need to compromise when all UN countries, except for one agree on the projection. The solution is simply to ignore the minority, especially if it has a government that itself has always refused to compromise with others.

kspacewalk2 8 hours ago | parent

It's a GA resolution. Vanuatu gets the same vote as India. No actually consequential global decisions could ever be made this way, so it's no wonder it's mostly used for symbolic votes like this one.

flexagoon 9 hours ago | parent

Here's an image I made to show the difference between Robinson and Equal Earth:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_Equal_...

Whichever you prefer, what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator.

poncho_romero 9 hours ago | parent

Why? Mercator is useful and familiar to billions of people.

mdp2021 8 hours ago | parent

> what matters is that we should all just stop using Mercator

Are you insane? Why should one? Is it because if you see a projection you are cognitively impacted? Well, get scholarized, and you will stop getting subconscious suggestions from unintended appearances.

Meanwhile, we will prefer orthogonal axes projections for all the cases where they work well.

By the way: in the territories I know, Mercator is just one of the projections used in texts and schools.

Apocryphon 9 hours ago | parent

I could’ve sworn that Robinson had already replaced Mercator by the ‘90s, so I was surprised to see defenders of the latter.

mc32 9 hours ago | parent

I'm partial to the Goode Homolosine projection, next is whatever NatGeo standardized on. Of course, the best is an actual globe --but decent sized ones are too expensive and the beach ball ones are just not very well made.

gumby 9 hours ago | parent

“Robinson projection” makes me think of Canadian fasteners.

MengerSponge 7 hours ago | parent

https://xkcd.com/977/

I have a Waterman on my wall :)

polski-g 51 minutes ago | parent

That is the best one, no idea why its not standard.

GolfPopper 9 hours ago | parent

Obligatory xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/977/

ButlerianJihad 9 hours ago | parent

Oh, it's not often we get an entire category of XKCD comics: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Category:Bad_Map_...

I'm partial to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2256:_Bad_Map_Pro...

lordloki 9 hours ago | parent

"And since we often, without thinking, use size as a proxy for importance or power, this subtly reinforces a sense of northern superiority over the global south."

We also use position as a proxy for importance or power, so perhaps they should flip the map over as well. /s

chrisra 8 hours ago | parent

I think a "reversed" south-at-the-top is a good idea to at least be aware of. I don't think it makes sense to reverse it since it just flips the problem, but it is (very slightly?) unlucky for the southern hemisphere.

jsLavaGoat 9 hours ago | parent

80% of the human population lives in the northern hemisphere, but closer to the equator.

simonw 9 hours ago | parent

I vibe-coded up an animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth (using D3) the other day, if anyone's interested in that comparison: https://tools.simonwillison.net/equal-earth

gumby 9 hours ago | parent

Very nice!

morepork 31 minutes ago | parent

People say Russia, Canada and Greenland look big in the Mercator projection, but what they miss is it makes Antarctica enormous, your app shows it nicely. So much so that many maps just cut off the bottom otherwise it looks a bit silly, but then the equator isn't in the middle.

decimalenough 9 hours ago | parent

It's kind of funny how the colonial convenience of having the 0 longitude line pass through Greenwich, UK ends up making Africa the most prominent place on the world map, since the centerpoint (0,0) is just off the African coast. This was true with Mercator as well, but Equal Earth emphasizes just how huge the African continent actually is.

gumby 9 hours ago | parent

For a while, France had its own prime meridian with 0 degrees passing of course through Paris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian

hn993302 5 hours ago | parent

Yeah, the prime meridian selection is the actually colonial part of the Mercator map. It's not like they were trying to make Europe look big, but they were trying to make London central.

ButlerianJihad 3 hours ago | parent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_meridians

  The Washington meridians are four meridians that were used as prime meridians in the United States which pass through Washington, D.C.

frmersdog 9 hours ago | parent

Oh, this is just getting started when it comes to upsetting traditionalists. I'd wager that the majority of map-reading happens on a screen these days, using software maps that can be rotated without changing the relative orientation of the labels.

...So why is it "Sub-Saharan Africa"? Why not "Super-Saharan Africa"? "Dexterous-Saharan Africa"? "Sinister-Saharan Africa?" It's all just convention (that just happens to favor Eurocentric notions). "Free your mind." -Morpheus

ericmay 1 hour ago | parent

Idk, I’m just going to call it Sub-American Africa

LeFantome 9 hours ago | parent

Time to rename Mercator the “Map of America”.

mdp2021 8 hours ago | parent

The distortions in maps with non orthogonal axes are evident already looking at Europe (though with centering at Greenwich). So, not just the "Map of America (of the Americas)" or "Map of Australia"... The compromises are just everywhere. Of course.

(Yes, I get what you meant. I am just suggesting other angles.)

samizdis 8 hours ago | parent

For quite a few years, and because I don't have a globe, I've turned to MapFight [0] to get a good idea of size/area comparisons for countries, significant geographic features and for historical lands/empires.

[0] https://www.mapfight.xyz/

JdeBP 7 hours ago | parent

I read the article thinking that it was not going to mention Dymaxion. Articles like this rarely do. The BBC has an article on the U.N. resolution (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly5r60v4mro), and it does not.

And then right at the bottom it went and mentioned Dymaxion.

Dymaxion is one of the few projections that actually shows Antarctica with something resembling its actual shape. Interestingly, to counter the people who say that the best thing to learn from is an actual globe, a couple of children's globes of the world that I had as a child had large metal caps around the axle that obscured most of Antarctica.

Any decent atlas uses a variety of projections, of course. The tatty, second-hand, older-than-I-am atlas that I had at school was already on to Interrupted Mollweide's Homolographic by page 3. (-:

hn993302 6 hours ago | parent

Even computer maps at the time like Google Earth had distortion around the poles, as if they were pieced together in slices. So that combined with the globe caps are why I never really knew what they looked like as a kid.

xyzelement 34 minutes ago | parent

As the article says, all protections have some distortions and it's just a matter of which ones you chose.

It's totally reasonable and rational for the African association of cartographer to push for this change - it makes their continent look bigger. At the margin, their children can look at the map and feel more significant.

On the flip side, this particular map makes Europe look smaller. So it means that at the margin, European children will look at the map and feel less significant.

It doesn't shock me that the US voted against it. I am surprised that others voted for it, and diminished themselves.

politician 14 minutes ago | parent

I'd love to hear from the folks that downvoted this carefully neutral observation.

qwerty_clicks 23 minutes ago | parent

and trump pooped his pants over it

scotty79 20 minutes ago | parent

Since we are moving away from print and towards screens, shouldn't we be just using actual globes?

bawolff 6 minutes ago | parent

Screens are still 2D objects requiring projections.