The World Map Is a Lie: How the Mercator Projection Warped Our Minds | Make This Make Sense

The map of the world [music] is a lie. You know that map that hung in your elementary school classroom, the same one you see now on Google Maps? Well, it's wrong. This is not what the world actually looks like. The size of a lot of these countries isn't real. Greenland, for example, looks massive, right? Huge. And it appears to be about the same size of Africa. Nope. Africa is actually [music] 14 times bigger than Greenland. What? Alaska? Huge, right? Nope. Mexico is actually bigger. [music] And Europe looks large and sprawling, but Europe in reality could fit entirely inside Africa. So the true size of the world's countries is not [music] this. It's actually this. How and why did this happen? [music] Well, I'm going to dive in and try to make this make sense. [music] In 1569, a guy with an epic beard named Gerardis Merkar created a flat map of the round Earth so that people sailing across the ocean could draw straight navigation lines to plan and measure their route. This is what Merkar's 1569 map of the world looked like. Merkar was from Europe and Europe at the time was the center of world exploration and conquest and a lot of that exploration and conquest was happening [music] via the Atlantic Ocean. So obviously Merkar put Europe and the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the map. Merkar died in 1594, but his map lived on, becoming the foundation for basically every world map ever since. But there's a problem here. You can't simply make a flat map out of a round sphere without there being some [music] distortions. Probably the best visual example of these distortions is this animation from a Norwegian history channel on YouTube. To make the Earth into a flat map, it is sliced into six curved pieces. Those curved pieces are then flattened, combined, and then stretched. And here is the current world map. But did you see what happened? Let's go back and watch that again. The countries near the poles get stretched out. Greenland goes from tadpole to Godzilla. Europe, Russia, and North America, which are incidentally three major world powers, get blown up like balloons. Fast forward to the 20th century and the Cold War. The Mercer projection map was in basically every Western school classroom. The United States big, [music] Soviet Union big, Europe big. The superpowers literally look super. Now, there was no official memo that said make us look bigger for propaganda reasons, but no one complained either. Maps aren't neutral, they're political. When your map makes you look large, you don't rush in to change it. Then in 1973, [music] along comes Arno Peters, who essentially says, "Hey, maybe making Europe all enormous and big and and Africa squeezed down and small isn't fair." He called the Merkar projection map colonialist propaganda and then released his own map, the Peter's projection. In Peter's map, Africa suddenly balloons to its true size. Europe shrinks down and everyone freaked out. For example, Matthew Edney, a renowned map historian, said Peters quote concocted a veritable ferago of lies to sell his map. adding that Peter's map was absurd and complete The German Cardographic Society published a 1985 booklet showing a red X through Peter's [music] map. They accused the map of being fake, an extreme defformation of the truth and complete nonsense. Peters wasn't actually a cgrapher. He was a historian and filmmaker. So the map experts saw him as an outsider hijacking their field for ideological reasons. And the map Peters promoted wasn't even new. It was almost identical to one proposed by Scottish cgrapher James Gaul in the 1850s. So Peter's map was eventually renamed the G Peters projection. Liberal entities like the United Nations embraced the Peters map, while more conservative entities clutched on to the traditional Merkar map. To many, while more accurate in size, the Peter's map just felt wrong. Does it feel wrong to you? Look at it. One of the reasons Peter's map might feel wrong is because we have literally been looking at the wrong map for over 400 years now. The debate over the Peters map was reignited in pop culture decades later in 2000 via the hit TV show The West Wing, where a nonprofit organization pitches the White House staff about replacing the traditional Merkar map with the Peters map >> for every public school in America to teach geography using the Peters projection map instead of the traditional Merkar. >> Give me 200 bucks and it's done. Really? >> No. The main characters, possibly reflecting most of society, are stunned to learn for the first time the true sizes of various countries. What the hell is that? >> It's where you've been living this whole time. >> Ultimately, in Western society, the Merkar map won. Though, there have been some compromises. National Geographic, for example, ditched the Merkar for the Robinson map, [music] which curves the world a bit and eliminates straight lines to accommodate Peter's complaints of size disparity. But Google Maps, arguably the most popular map on the planet, still uses a modified version of the Merkar projection. But as you've now learned, this is not what the world looks like. Yep. We're still using a 16th century map projection that intentionally minimizes Africa's true size. >> In 2025, the African Union is officially calling on the world to ditch the Mercer map and adopt one that shows the true size of continents. A campaign called correct the map has proposed the equal earth projection a new map which claims to portray the world accurately and keeps the continents proportional. >> They diminish the size of Africa to make everything fit. >> Farah Nadi, co-founder of Speak Up Africa, said the Merkar map unfairly portrays her continent and has harmed Africa's identity and pride. The current size of the map of Africa is wrong. It's the world's longest misinformation and disinformation campaign and it just simply has to stop. The Correct the Map campaign wants institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations to adopt the new equal Earth map. And a World Bank spokesperson says they've already started using the Equal Earth map and are phasing out the Merkar map. If you want to dive into the Merkar map yourself and see the actual size of different countries, there's a great online tool called the true size.com. Type in any country and then drag it around the map. Canada, for example, looks huge on the Merkar map, but drag it down to South America and you suddenly see its actual size. the United States, it would fit entirely inside Africa, which in reality is massive. [music] The Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, is onethird the size of the entire United States. The one that is most mindblowing to me is Russia, which dominates the Mercer map. Look at it. It looks colossal. But drag it down to the equator and it shrinks way, way down. The 1569 Merkar map might have helped sailors circumvent the globe, but it totally shipwrecked our minds. It made powerful nations look bigger and everyone else smaller. Not just on paper, but in perception. And that's the thing about maps. They don't just show the world. They show what the world thinks of itself.

The world map you grew up with is wrong. A 16th-century map designed for sailors ended up shipwrecking our minds, and shaping global superpowers, for centuries. The Mercator projection hugely distorts reality — making countries like Greenland and Europe look massive, while Africa and South America shrink. From the controversial Peters Projection sparking outrage in the 1970s to the African Union’s current "Equal Earth" campaign, it's clear that humans still don't agree on what the world even looks like. #makethismakesense #worldmaps #maps The New York Post is your source for breaking news, news about New York, sports, business, entertainment, opinion, real estate, culture, fashion, and more. Check out our two new podcasts: Pod Force One with MIranda Devine (weekly): https://www.youtube.com/@PodForce1 NY POSTcast (daily): https://www.youtube.com/@NYPOSTcast Get The Post’s latest headlines everyday with our Morning Report newsletter: https://tinyurl.com/NYPOSTSIGNUP Catch the latest news at http://www.nypost.com. Follow The New York Post on: Twitter - https://twitter.com/nypost Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NYPost