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 with an apology. 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; Africa had swollen to proportions nobody in the room was used to seeing. Peters was already known for trying to remove Europe from its privileged place in world history. He 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; in fact Africa covers 30 million square kilometres and the Soviet Union 22.4 million. Scandinavia looked the size of India, though 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 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 found a patron. At the end of 1977 Willy Brandt gave a copy to every member of his North-South commission. Other maps put Europe at the centre of the world, he said, 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 started. 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 trouble is that nobody can win this argument outright. Carl Friedrich Gauss proved it with his Theorema Egregium: a sphere’s surface cannot be laid flat without distortion. Every projection is a decision about which lie to tell. The French mathematician Nicolas Auguste Tissot even built a device for making the lie visible. He scattered small ellipses across a map where the meridians and parallels cross, each one the squashed image of a circle that had been the same size on the globe.
The man who set the terms travelled almost nowhere. Gerardus Mercator, born in 1512, built his geography out of a library of more than a thousand books and maps, out of visitors, and out of correspondence 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 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 inflated the further it lies from the equator, so Greenland and Antarctica loom. Use of the projection for anything other than marine charts faded through the twentieth century, then came roaring back in the twenty-first, because it suits online maps that are calculated on demand.
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 started 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: a hybrid that blends traits of the Eckert IV and Putninš P4’ projections. They assembled it in a web application Jenny had written for designing new projections, and other cartographers gave feedback on how it looked. They released a world political map in the new projection online, free of charge, in August 2018, and presented it that autumn at the North American Cartographic Information Society conference in Norfolk, Virginia. The aim was a visually pleasing alternative to Gall-Peters, one on which continents keep recognisable shapes. The overall look is close to the Robinson projection, which is not equal-area at all.
Patterson had spent 26 years with the US National Park Service at the Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia before retiring, making maps with the shaded relief work he is known for. He treats geospatial data the way a painter treats the colours on a palette. “They are raw materials from which the map is made,” he says. “For me, the map making process starts with an online scavenger hunt for geospatial data, and ends with a visual depiction of the results of that scavenger hunt, a map.”
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. Six abstained. The resolution is not legally binding and obliges nobody to abandon Mercator. It simply encourages wider use of projections that show relative sizes truthfully, at the cost of some distortion of shape.
The debate on the floor was not 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. “Instead of focusing on genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations, this body is debating map projects from the 16th Century, and their role in promoting reparations and ‘cognitive justice’,” she said.
The resolution’s name was 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 investment case. 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 changes is another matter. Map-making is decentralised and no authority regulates which projection anyone uses, as the cartographers Jack Swab and Derek Alderman point out; what the assembly endorsed was a message. Actually replacing the picture means revising textbooks, databases, media productions and diplomatic documents, which costs labour and money, and every individual map-maker has to opt in. Mercator, meanwhile, is not going anywhere, because Google Maps and Apple Maps rely on a variation of it to tell you where to turn. Resistance at the UN was thin: Ukraine abstained because of the way the Equal Earth website depicts the contested Crimean Peninsula, which drew a Russian response, and other states raised their own contested borders.
There is even a question about whether the harm was ever what everyone assumed. Through the 1990s scholars took it for granted that looking at Mercator gave people false beliefs about the size of continents, a so-called Mercator effect. A growing number of perception studies since have failed to find it.
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.