In Bonn, in the spring of 1973, a 56 year old historian named Arno Peters stood in front of journalists and unrolled a world map. He began by apologising. He was sorry to shock them, he said, but these were the real surface areas. On his map, Europe had become small and was no longer in the centre, while Africa had grown much bigger than anyone in the room was used to seeing. Peters said he believed he had given the first honest picture of the Earth, and that developing countries had been cheated about their true size for years.
His examples were simple. On the maps everyone grew up with, the Soviet Union looked bigger than Africa, but Africa covers 30 million square kilometres and the Soviet Union 22.4 million. Scandinavia looked as large as India, although India is three times bigger. Peters told Dutch reporters that the old sailors’ chart, drawn by Gerhard Kremer, who worked under the name Mercator, was a typical product of colonial rulers: the former colonies came out far too small and the western European countries far too big. A British journalist at the presentation looked at his country’s empire on the map and said he could finally see how much land they had lost with the colonies.
The map found an important supporter. At the end of 1977 Willy Brandt gave a copy to every member of his North-South commission, saying that other maps put Europe in the centre of the world, while this one showed the part of the Earth where two thirds of humanity lives.
Nobody, however, can win this argument completely. The mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss proved that the surface of a ball cannot be made flat without distortion, which means that shapes or sizes always change. Every projection, every way of drawing the round Earth on flat paper, is a decision about which mistake to accept.
Mercator, born in 1512, published his world map in 1569. On it, a course with a constant direction appears as a straight line, which is why it is still used in sea charts today. The price is that land far from the equator looks much too big, so Greenland and Antarctica seem enormous. The projection became less common during the twentieth century, but it returned in the twenty-first because it works well for online maps.
In 2017, after Boston Public Schools announced it would change its classroom maps, the cartographer Tom Patterson began looking for a better alternative. With Bojan Šavrič and Bernhard Jenny he chose a name first, Equal Earth, and then built the map itself. They put it online, free of charge, in August 2018. The aim was a map that shows true sizes but keeps continents in shapes people recognise.
In September 2026 the United Nations General Assembly voted to promote equal-area projections, and Equal Earth in particular. One hundred and sixty-four countries voted in favour, six did not vote, and the United States was the only country to vote against. The resolution does not force anyone to stop using Mercator.
The French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot said: “Changing the map obviously doesn’t change the world. But correcting a representation that distorts it is already an act of truth.” The American representative Yaryna Ferencevych said the resolution made fun of the purpose of the General Assembly, because the body was debating maps from the sixteenth century instead of real problems of peace and prosperity.
The resolution was called Correct the Map. Its main point was the one Peters had made: Africa is about 14 times the size of Greenland, not almost the same size.
Patterson keeps his own reason simple. “If you’re using the Mercator map as a world map, say, in the classroom, students would just have a completely warped view of the size of countries in the world,” he said.