Also notable that in the centuries following Mercator projection, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and the northern parts of South America actually shrunk by the map were regarded as vast, unexplored wildernesses full of resources to plunder (and the northern realms expanded by the projection as inaccessible icy wasteland). Difficult to imagine the Gall-Peters projection making conquistadors and colonists from little European countries more respectful of the inhabitants of the equatorial realms, though I guess they might have got lost more using it...

Ironically it's by looking at a globe rather than even a map like this that Greenlands worth becomes more visible. We need to centre the globe on Greenland and see what it tells us.

Greenland has at least two reasons to be worth more then it is now: in the future when the north polar ice sheet melts. The arctic circle becomes a navigable ocean. It's a short way from USA and Europe to Asia (or Russia).

Secondly removing the ice means it's much easier to get the essential hydrocarbons underneath of which there are lots of and which many countries will want.

So the reasons for Greenland is geography, security, control, trade and economy. And by thinking long term. It can also explain some off handed and mocked comments about Canada too.

In my childhood I definitely thought Greenland was a much physically large place than it is, because of the mercator world map the hung on the wall in home room. Was dumbfounded when I learned it actually fits within the continental US.

Agreed - territorial area is only one measure of importance, and probably not a great one. What would be more useful on a wall, if we are interested in such things, are bubbles with size showing population, GDP, life expectancy, etc. (a la https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$chart-type=bubbles&url=v2 ), arranged to preserve, as much as possible, country positions on the projection of your choosing.

The Greenwich meridian is not actually 100% arbitrary. It is a convenient location that does not split into two any significant landmasses.

> Does anyone really think Greenland is the most important place in the world?

Well, no-one sensible. However.

"I love maps. And I always said: 'Look at the size of this. It's massive. That should be part of the United States.'"

That’s noted very stable genius Donald Trump, there, on the enormity of Greenland, and why it would therefore be something which it is sensible to somehow try to buy.

> I have always found it a bizarre idea that we allegedly judge a country's importance by it's size on a Mercator projection map

I don’t think anyone thinks this, because it is bizarre. It’s just that at some point we stigmatized calling out stupid ideas as long as someone is purporting to speak on behalf of non-Europeans.

Doesn't bringing up the topic of different projections still act as a good reminder that maps of spherical planets will always have one issue or another?

Graphical representations of things have an impact on preception and then by proxy on thinking. Maintaining aome degree of general awareness of these impacts leads to better thinking that is more reflective of the ground truth.

Some would call that "woke" with bad intentions, but hey, they got an agenda and that agaenda doesn't care about facts.

IIRC my daughter used to have an inflatable plastic ball with a Earth political map on it, it's cheap enough to give each kid their own globe.

I went to school in virginia and we had globes. Did you guys not have globes in other states?

This.

Bonus, it helps make clear what is wrong with many flat-earthers assertions.

I think you may have misunderstood the meaning of the brackets. The key says this means “dependency or area of special sovereignty”.

The " (UK)" appendix roughly indicates who would come to protect them in case somebody else tried to invade.

The channel island Jersey, for instance, more correctly "The Bailiwick of Jersey", is an autonomous and self-governing island territory of the British Islands. It is a British Crown Dependency with an independent local gouvernment, but not a sovereign state.

I see Amami, what is the error?

mandatory Gall–Peters clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVX-PrBRtTY

Mobile version

https://m.xkcd.com/977/

Living in the northern hemisphere, it bugs me that standard north-up, west-left maps don't match up with the sun and with our clocks. It's neat that both clock hands and the sun are "up" at noon. It would be even neater if that upward direction corresponded to south, since that's where the sun actually is at midday. With south-at-top, east-to-the-left, maps would sync with both our clocks and the sun's daily arc. But then we would lose the west-left rhyme.

As a European the "Oceania - South at Top" looks like some other planet. I like this very much - that there are ways of looking at something so singular and familiar, our shared planet, that make it look new and unfamiliar.

    > •  The curved sides of the projection suggest the spherical form of Earth.
    > •  Straight parallels that make it easier to compare how far north or south places are from the equator.

Okay, we've now added a constraint that this should be pseudocylindrical [0].

So why pick this over, say, Eckert IV or something from the Tobler Hyperelliptical family?

There is perhaps an additional argument (present on the wiki page [1], and elaborated on the paper introducing the projection [2]) that the equal earth projection is computationally easier to translate between lat/long and map coordinates, as it explicitly uses a polynomial equation instead of strict elliptical arcs. (This is the main argument presented against Eckert IV.)

The paper also lists some additional aesthetic goals: poles do not converge to points (ruling out Tobler Hyperelliptical), and meridians do not bulge excessively.

In fact, the paper describes Equal Area to be a blend of Craster parabolic and Eckert IV (then aesthetically tuned to avoid being stretched too much in either direction). It is also notable that the Equal Area paper measures both lower scale distortion and angular deformation for Eckert IV.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections#pseudo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=doi.org%2F10.1080%2F136...

edit: I found https://map-projections.net/singleview.php which you can view a bunch of other possible candidates by selecting Pseudocylindric + Equal-Area.

Yes, and there are also already multiple equal-area projections with similar properties, too. For example, the Goode homolosine "orange-peel" projection only loses out by failing to show contiguous oceans (emphasizing land masses instead) and having a discontinuity where two simpler projections are joined. It gives equal-area projection and improved shapes (as compared to fully homolographic projections) while still showing "curved sides [that] suggest the spherical form of Earth" (arguably, far more so). Its parallels are straight, and furthermore they are equidistant in the central latitudes (in which it's based on a sinusoidal projection).

Oh, and it was developed over a century ago, and already in common use when Arno Peters started his activism for the Gall-Peters projection (called this even though Peters made no refinements in independently developing a projection identical to Gall's 1855 work, and even initially mis-described it).

I read that and it's still not clear because there are already projections that meet those criteria.