🌍 The US Was the Only Country to Vote Against the UN's New World Map

On Friday, the UN voted to adopt the Equal Earth map projection. 164 member states voted in favour of the resolution to change the map, 6 abstained — and only the United States voted against.

⚡️ The breakthrough in a nutshell:
The Equal Earth projection aims to "provide a fair representation of the real sizes of the world's regions, in particular Africa."

🔬 Key findings:
• The world — including Google Maps — still mostly uses the Mercator projection, created in 1569.
• Mercator is great for navigation: north–south lines keep constant true bearings relative to the equator. But it distorts country sizes: regions farther from the equator look disproportionately bigger than those closer to it.
• On a Mercator map, Greenland looks about the size of Africa. In reality, Africa is roughly 14 times larger than Greenland. Equal Earth is designed to fix that.

💼 Why it matters:
Critics of the most popular projection have long noted it isn't abandoned partly because it "enlarges and centres" Europe and North America. The UN resolution states that "the Mercator projection, due to its distortion, perpetuates an unbalanced representation of the world."

The first image shows the Equal Earth projection; the second shows the Mercator projection.

#Maps #Cartography #Geography #UN #Science

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