In Bonn, in the spring of 1973, a 56-year-old historian named Arno Peters stood in front of the press and unrolled a world map. He began by apologising. He was sorry to shock them, he said, but these were the real surface areas. Europe had shrunk to something unimportant and was no longer at the centre, while Africa had swollen to a size nobody in the room was used to seeing. Peters, who was already known for trying to push Europe out of the centre of world history, said he believed he had given the first honest picture of the Earth, and that the developing countries had been cheated about their true size for years.
His examples were blunt. On the maps everyone grew up with, the Soviet Union looked bigger than Africa, yet Africa covers 30 million square kilometres and the Soviet Union 22.4 million. Scandinavia looked the size of India, although India is three times larger. The sailors’ chart drawn by Gerhard Kremer, who worked under the name Mercator, was a typical product of colonial rulers, Peters told Dutch reporters that same week: the former colonies came out far too small and the western European countries far too big. He handed out his own version in bright pop colours. A British journalist at the presentation looked at the shrunken remains of his country’s empire and said he could finally see how much land they had lost with the colonies.
The map soon found a powerful 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 at the centre of the world, while this one emphasised the part of the Earth where two thirds of humanity lives. It ended up on the cover of the commission’s report on development. Peters, by then living in Bremen, told the International Herald Tribune how it had begun: he was sitting in his study one day, looking at the big map on the wall, when it struck him that this map, used everywhere on Earth, simply did not show the world we live in.
The problem is that nobody can win this argument completely. Carl Friedrich Gauss proved it: the surface of a sphere cannot be laid flat without distortion. Every projection is therefore a decision about which lie to tell.
The man who set the terms of the debate travelled almost nowhere. Gerardus Mercator, born in 1512, built his geography out of a library of more than a thousand books and maps, plus visitors and letters in six languages. In 1569 he published a world map on a new projection, on which courses of constant bearing appeared as straight lines, and that innovation is still used in nautical charts today. He also gave us the word atlas, borrowed from a legendary king of Mauretania. The price of those straight lines is that land is stretched the further it lies from the equator, so Greenland and Antarctica loom over everything. The projection was used less and less through the twentieth century, then came roaring back in the twenty-first, because it suits online maps.
Which brings us to a cartographer at his screen in 2017. Boston Public Schools had announced that it was switching all its classroom world maps to the Gall-Peters projection, and the news ran everywhere. About a week into the coverage, Tom Patterson began working through equal-area projections in search of an alternative. With Bojan Šavrič of Esri and Bernhard Jenny of Monash University, he settled first on a name, Equal Earth, and then built the thing, blending features of two existing projections in a web application Jenny had written. They released a world political map in the new projection online, free of charge, in August 2018, and presented it that autumn at a cartography conference in Norfolk, Virginia. The aim was a visually pleasing alternative to Gall-Peters, one on which the continents keep recognisable shapes.
In September 2026 the United Nations General Assembly voted to recognise the distortions built into Mercator and to promote equal-area projections, Equal Earth in particular. One hundred and sixty-four countries voted in favour. The United States was the only country to vote against, and six abstained. The resolution is not legally binding and forces nobody to abandon Mercator.
The debate was not really about geometry. The French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot, whose ministry said it would stop using Mercator, offered a line that sounded rehearsed and probably was: “Changing the map obviously doesn’t change the world. But correcting a representation that distorts it is already an act of truth.” Yaryna Ferencevych, a US representative, said the resolution mocked the purpose of the General Assembly, which was debating maps from the sixteenth century instead of real problems of peace and prosperity.
The resolution was called Correct the Map, and the correction it wanted was the one Peters had wanted: Africa is about 14 times the size of Greenland, not roughly equal to it. For the Kenyan geographer Kioko Muendo, the old picture quietly diminished Africa’s resources, population and attractiveness to investors. But the new map gives up the straight lines that made Mercator perfect for navigation, and it cannot be used to measure true distance.
Whether anything will actually change is another matter. Nobody regulates which projection map-makers use, so what the assembly approved was a message. Replacing the picture would mean revising textbooks, databases, media productions and diplomatic documents, which costs time and money. Meanwhile Mercator is not going anywhere, because Google Maps and Apple Maps use a version of it to tell you where to turn.
There is even doubt about the harm. Through the 1990s scholars assumed that looking at Mercator gave people false beliefs about the size of continents, but a growing number of studies since then have failed to find that effect.
Patterson’s case does not rest on the studies. “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.