In the spring of 1973, in Bonn, a historian named Arno Peters showed a world map to journalists. He said he was sorry to shock them, but these were the real sizes of the land. Europe was small on his map, and it was not in the middle. Africa was very big. Peters said this was the first honest picture of the Earth, and that poor countries had looked too small for many years.
He gave examples. On normal maps, the Soviet Union looked bigger than Africa. But Africa is 30 million square kilometres and the Soviet Union is 22.4 million. Scandinavia looked as big as India, but India is three times bigger. Peters told Dutch reporters that the old sailors’ map by Gerhard Kremer, who used the name Mercator, was made by colonial rulers.
There is a problem: no flat map can be perfect. You cannot make a ball flat without changing something. Every map changes something.
Mercator was born in 1512. In 1569 he made a new world map. On it, a ship’s course was a straight line, so sailors loved it. We still use his idea today. But on his map, land far from the equator looks too big, so Greenland looks very large. Today many computer maps use his idea again.
In 2017, schools in Boston said they would use a different map in classrooms. About a week later, a map maker named Tom Patterson started to look for a better map. He worked with Bojan Šavrič and Bernhard Jenny. First they chose a name, Equal Earth, and then they made the map. They put it online for free in August 2018.
In September 2026, the United Nations voted. The vote was for maps that show the real sizes of countries, and for Equal Earth. 164 countries voted yes. Only the United States voted no. Six countries did not vote. But no country must stop using Mercator.
The vote was called Correct the Map. Africa is about 14 times bigger than Greenland, not the same size.
Patterson said that if students use a Mercator map in the classroom, they get a very wrong idea about the size of countries.