Post #4618327 · Elektrine

2026-09-04 18:09 UTC

The Mercator map projection keeps generating controversy, because it is completely fucked up. Greenland looks like it's the size of South America (it's about the size of Algeria). Antarctica looks like it dwarfs all of Eurasia (it's a bit smaller than Russia). Africa looks like it's a lot smaller than it actually is, and the centre of the world (at least longitudinally) is conspicuously Greenwich in England. It has one redeeming feature (and all the aforementioned was *not* considered politically incendiary back in the 1500s!), and that is that a straight line on a Mercator map corresponds to a straight bearing on the actual globe. So it's incredibly useful for navigation - especially when this involved compasses and sextants and paper, rather than GPS trackers and satellites and computers. But *because* it so greatly distorts the sizes of landmasses, it's probably not the best choice for eg. a school classroom world map, where it mostly creates misconceptions and its main quality has little use. Here is my favourite alternative, the Dymaxion projection, which balances right on the knife edge between "utterly brilliant" and "batshit insane".

Replies (2)

@MaddieM4@raphus.social 2026-09-04 18:15

@datarama@hachyderm.io Based on the name, I'm guessing this one's a Buckminster Fuller original?

Open ##4618326
@datarama@hachyderm.io 2026-09-04 18:25

A Dymaxion map is made by first projecting the Earth onto an icosahedron and then choosing some vertex and unfolding it from that. It traditionally centers the North Pole (and the one I found above doesn't show antarctica at all - normally, they end up with little bits of Antarctica spread along the edges). But you could choose wherever you want. The North Pole one is popular because it neatly turns the continents into a mostly connected landmass. It has the very nice property that it greatly reduces distortion *both* of size and shape - Mercator maps screw up relative sizes, and Peters and Equal Earth maps screw up shapes. Dymaxion gets both of them *almost* right. The price is that it is completely useless for navigation. You can't even easily tell where north, south east and west is, so you get a completely fucked-up view of how a ship or a plane would have to travel to go from any two spots. One thing that I find it's *very* neat for - especially in the north-pole-centered configuration - is illustrating land-based migrations, such as those of prehistoric humans. You can plot in any arbitrary migration route and never have to do a Pac-Man teleport from the east edge to the west edge! And since you can pick any point as centre (which its inventor, Buckminster Fuller, himself promoted as a feature), you could quickly make a reoriented version that could be used to illustrate eg. marine animal migration instead. As a pedagogical map for kids, it has an absolutely *killer* feature: You can fold it back up into an icosahedron, and neatly illustrate 1. the relation of a map to a globe, and 2. the compromises that necessarily happen when trying to project a spheroid surface onto a flat one.

Open ##4618401