New Delhi: Member states of the African Union, on 15 August, signed a petition for the world to ‘reject’ the Mercator map projection and accept a more equitable projection that “more accurately reflects the true size of Africa”. The petition has garnered more than 5,000 verified signatures.
Mercator projection is one of the most famous world map projections and was developed by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in the 16th century. Initially developed for navigation, it was later widely adopted for making atlases and maps across the world, and a version of it is still used for web-based applications like Google Maps and GPS.
However, Mercator projection has been criticised for some time now for inaccuracies in the size of the countries it depicts, especially near the poles.
The projection uses a cylindrical view of the Earth, which means it is a representation of the spherical Earth on a cylindrical two-dimensional surface. What this does, according to cartographers, is use the same latitude lengths at the Equator and at the poles, thus unnecessarily stretching the sizes of countries near the poles.
“See in the Earth, the size of latitudes reduces as we get closer to the poles, but the Mercator map uses the same latitude length, for uniformity,” explained Siddhartha Priyadarshi, deputy director at National Atlas & Thematic Mapping Organization (NATMO). “Due to this, places like Greenland and Antarctica get shown much bigger than they actually are.”
Titled Correct the Map, the campaign to do away with it is being spearheaded by African advocacy groups Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, according to a report by Reuters.
In the Mercator projection, Greenland is often shown as larger than Africa when in reality Africa is thrice the size of Greenland. Others, like the US, Russia, Canada, and other Global North countries, too, are shown to be larger, due to the stretching out that occurs in the Mercator projection.
Since India and Africa are closer to the Equator, they’re shown to be relatively smaller in comparison to the other countries.
“There is no one accurate map of the world. Every map, because it tries to represent a sphere onto a plane surface, has some inaccuracies,” Priyadarshi told ThePrint. Adding, “Some like Mercator retain the original shape of the countries, but not the size. Other maps have the original size but could compromise on distance or shape.”
Priyadarshi is referring to the mathematical concept of Gaussian curvature, which essentially states that any spherical surface can never be mapped on a plane surface without some distortions. This is because spheres have an ‘intrinsic curvature’ while plane surfaces don’t, and no amount of mathematical calculations can erase this.
Other projections like the Gall-Peters of 1972, or the Hobo-Dyer of 2002, were presented as alternatives to the Mercator since both are ‘equal-area’ projections that show the correct size of each country. However, these projections are unable to capture the shape of each country accurately, which ends up with most of the countries looking stretched and elongated.
“The Earth is not flat, it is a sphere. So mathematically, it is impossible to have one accurate flat map. This is why it is recommended to have different maps for different purposes; Mercator was just for navigation. There could be other maps for other purposes too, which might show things differently,” Mafizul Haque, an assistant professor with the department of geography at the University of Calcutta, told ThePrint.
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Maps & projection of ‘power’
The Correct the Map campaign argues that the inaccurate representation of Africa in maps is not just about the size of the country, but about “power and perception”. It draws from a long line of scholarly work that connects maps and map-making with larger forces of colonialism, imperialism, and inequality.
“Maps possess a visual language of their own , and they are used to present certain ideas. They are not solely objective, factual measurements but are often also projections of power made by someone, for someone with a particular intent in mind,” Natallia Khaniejo, a visiting faculty of International Relations at Ashoka University told ThePrint. “Cartography has deep rooted historical links to imperial ambition and colonial power.”
Khaniejo explained that the Mercator projection is not the first time that a European map has distorted or misrepresented a region in the “Global South”, and how map-making as an endeavour has gone hand-in-hand with colonialism, the legacies of which we are still living through today. The famous Berlin Conference of 1884-85, when major European powers met to carve up Africa, is a strong example of the use of maps in expanding and satiating imperial powers.
Even the way most maps today place Europe at the center, with America to the left and Asia to the right, is a legacy of imperial practices and Eurocentricism.
Maps have often been used for political purposes. During the Cold War, the US often used the Mercator map projection, which showed Russia (then USSR) to be much bigger than it actually was. This was to create fear in the minds of the public about the actual threat of the enemy.
This came to be known as ‘cartographic propaganda’.
The real Africa can fit India, the US, and China within it, making it one of the largest landmasses ever. However, the Correct the Map campaign says, this historical misrepresentation has changed the way the world views Africa. Now, by adopting the Equal Earth projection map, it would be a way to “challenge the status quo” and dismantle the colonial legacy of the Mercator map.
Unlike the Mercator projection, the Equal Earth projection displays the size of countries in a relatively accurate manner and retains their relative shape.
Introduced in 2018, the Equal Earth projection goes a step ahead of Gall-Peters and other newer projections by creating a ‘visually appealing’ version of existing equal-area maps. However, even the Equal Earth projection has some compromises due to the Gaussian curvature rule, and is still a ‘relative’ equal area map rather than a perfect representation of the globe.
“Efforts like these (the campaign) are a way of speaking to how colonial cartography has shaped the modern ‘international’, and I believe demonstrate efforts towards recovering alternate conceptions of the world, indigenous maps, and map-making forms,” said Khaniejo. “However, despite the laudability of the endeavour it does little to actually undo the historical wrongs and economically exploitative processes that have followed in the wake of this misrepresented map-making.”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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