Maps Have Bigger Problems Than the Mercator Projection. They Invent Mountain Ranges and Usually Eliminate New Zealand
Maps have always had problems. Five hundred years ago, maps were wildly inaccurate simply because cartographers were drawing the edge of the known world, limited by slow ships and nonexistent satellite data, resulting in continents that were too large, too small, or entirely misplaced. All of those problems have been solved thanks to new technology, but now there are new ones. Even though we know the exact dimensions of Earth, our maps are still "wrong" because we force a three-dimensional globe onto a flat surface, leading to mathematical distortions like the Mercator projection, which wildly exaggerates the size of landmasses near the poles. One map that tries to correct the Mercator projection's distortion of landmass sizes is the Gall-Peters projection, but to achieve this size accuracy, it severely stretches and distorts shapes, particularly near the poles, making Alaska look like a whirlpool or expanding pinwheel.
To make it even more confusing, there are maps that were deliberately tweaked to hide government secrets or those drawn with junk data just to trick an enemy into giving up territory. But for today’s guests, Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones, they enjoy these sort of cartographic oddities. They are the authors of “This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong and Why it Matters.” We discuss all sorts of maps that went wrong—from the infamous Mountains of Kong—a completely made-up mountain range that ran East-West across the entire African continent--to colonial maps with mathematically impossible borders and US states with fake cities. We also discuss
- The frequent omissions of New Zealand on maps that use the Mercator projection
- Maps that will land you in prison depending on which countries claim certain territories
- Cold War-era Soviet paranoia that falsified virtually all maps for decades on the direct orders of secret police
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