The ongoing feud over whether Mercator or Gall-Peters is the worst map projection

I keep seeing people argue about which map projection is the most misleading and it always turns into this same debate. One side says Mercator is garbage because it makes Greenland look bigger than Africa when Africa is actually 14 times larger. The other side says Gall-Peters is just as bad because it stretches countries near the equator into weird skinny shapes that don't match reality at all. I noticed this at a local library last week where they had a Gall-Peters map on the wall and someone actually complained it looked like South America got flattened by a steamroller. My buddy who drives trucks says he uses Mercator for road trip planning because it keeps compass bearings straight which is fine for short trips but terrible for global perspective. I personally think both projections have their place but the internet fights make them out to be either completely evil or totally useless. Why does it have to be one or the other when you could just use an interactive globe app instead? Anybody else get tired of seeing these same two projections blamed for everything wrong with geography?

2 comments

2 Comments

casey9437d ago

Hold on, Africa is actually about 14.5 times bigger than Greenland, not 14 times exactly.

anthony8836d ago

Wait, really? Ngl I always assumed it was close to 14 even, that's wild how much bigger the difference actually is.