Looking at a map, you might notice that Greenland and Africa are roughly the same sizes or that Russia and Canada tower over their much, much, smaller neighbors.
But these observations would be wrong, You are most likely looking at a Mercator Projection, which was presented by a cartographer called Gerardus Mercator in 1569. This projection was meant to preserve shape, but more importantly, direction, which made it a priceless tool for navigators. If you drew a straight line from Point A to Point B on The Mercator Projection, and you followed that same line at the same exact same angle you drew it in, you would be guaranteed to land in Point B.
But where this map fell short was the depiction of size, earlier I said that Greenland looks roughly the same size as Africa on the map, but look at a globe, and that is not true at all.
This is because, The Mercator map shows land masses at the poles (like Greenland, Russia, Canada, Antarctica, etc) as absolutely gargantuan When in reality they are much smaller.
Here is what it would look like if you drew a series of dots evenly spaced apart on a spherical globe and translated that into The Mercator Projection.
The dots at the poles seem massive compared to their smaller counterparts at the equator!
The Mercator projection trades accurate depiction of size for a gift of preserving direction. But it’s not like that just for The Mercator. No map can ever be perfect, because of one simple fact, You cannot hope to transform a 3D sphere into a 2D rectangle without distorting it to some amount.
