I’ve always liked maps of the world, atlases and globes. As a kid, I could spend hours lost in them and the real places they could take me in an imaginary way. I’m certainly not a cartographer and my high school geography teachers would probably rate me as only so-so, doing better in the social aspects of geography than the physical sciences aspect.
Sharpies $$$ Store in Southwood Shopping Plaza in Thompson is pretty much right behind the area of Juniper Drive I live on. Last fall, Jeanette and me wandered in on a Saturday afternoon and emerged each with $2 roll-down The World Political Atlantic Centred HPC Publishers’ Distributors Pvt. Ltd. wall maps from 2012. Mine is hanging over my desk at home as I write this. The HPC Publishers’ Distributors Pvt. Ltd. Mercator projection map carries several disclaimers. The most general one in the fine print is that “boundary representation is not necessarily authoritative.”
Interestingly, but perhaps not very surprising since the map was made in New Delhi, India tops the list when it comes to acknowledgements, including a 2011 copyright, in the bottom right hand corner of the map: “The Topographical details within India are based upon Survey of India map with the permission of the Surveyor General or India.” And “the territorial waters of India extend into the sea to a distance of twelve nautical miles measured from the appropriate base line.” Or the External Boundary and Coast-Line of India on the map agrees with the RecordMaster copy certified by the Survey of India.”
If I glance up just a few inches from writing a post for my blog at https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/, I can view a fascinating factbox bar running full length along the bottom of the 27-inch vertical x 37-inch horizontal map, letting me know that the driest place on Earth is not, as I might have guessed, somewhere like the Arabian Peninsula’s Rub al Khali, or Empty Quarter desert of Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen, but rather the Atacama Desert of Chile in South America, with “rainfall barely measurable.”
One afternoon a few months ago I was glancing up just a bit above the factbox at the bottom of the map when my eye was drawn to San Carlos de Bariloche in the province of Río Negro, Argentina, situated in the foothills of the Andes on the southern shores of Nahuel Huapi Lake. A few clicks more and Wikipedia told me that according to the 2010 census the city “has a permanent population of 108,205” and “after development of extensive public works and Alpine-styled architecture,” San Carlos de Bariloche at 41° 9′ 0″ S latitude “emerged in the 1930s and 1940s as a major tourism centre with ski, trekking and mountaineering facilities. In addition, it has numerous restaurants, cafés, and chocolate shops.” Sounds most pleasant, all in all.
Today, of course, marks the 503rd birthday of Gerhard Kremer, who is better known for the Latinized version of his name, Gerardus Mercator. The name Kremer in German, and Cremer in Dutch both mean merchant. The Latin name for a merchant was Mercator.
Mercator is the Flemish mathematician and cartographer, who in 1569 “discovered how to create a flat map that takes into consideration the curvatures of the earth,” writes Kevin McSpadden in TIME magazine online, noting Mercator “has been honored in a new Google doodle.”
Even before Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google in September 1998, the concept of the doodle was born when Page and Brin placed a stick figure drawing behind the second “o” in the word, Google, intended as a comical message to Google users that the founders were “out of office.”
Two years later in 2000, they asked then Google webmaster Dennis Hwang to produce a doodle for Bastille Day. It was so well received by users that Hwang was appointed Google’s “chief doodler” and doodles started showing up more and more regularly on the Google homepage.
“In the beginning,” Google says, “they mostly celebrated familiar holidays; nowadays, they highlight a wide array of events and anniversaries from the 1st Drive-In Movie to the educator Maria Montessori.”
Since 1998 there have been more than 2,000 doodles on Google’s homepage. You can see them all at http://www.google.com/doodles
“Jailed for heresy in 1544, Mercator later revolutionized navigational theory,” McSpadden writes in TIME. “His theory, dubbed the ‘Mercator projection,’ was a major breakthrough for navigation because for the first time sailors could plot a route using straight lines without constantly adjusting their compass readings.
“However, because the projection lengthens the longitudinal parallels, the scale of objects enlarge dramatically as they near the north and south poles and the method becomes unusable at around 70 degrees north/south.
By increasingly inflating the sizes of regions according to their distance from the equator, the Mercator projections results in a representation of Greenland that is larger than Africa, which has a geographic area 14 times greater than Greenland’s. Since much of the Third World lies near the equator, these countries appear smaller on a Mercator projection.
Other major misconceptions based on Mercator projection maps are:
- Alaska is nearly as large as the continental United States;
- Europe (excluding Russia) is only a bit larger than South America;
- Antarctica dwarfs all the continents.
In reality:
- Alaska can fit inside the continental United States about three times;
- South America nearly doubles Europe’s land mass;
- Antarctica looks like the second-smallest continent.
German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss’ differential geometry Theorema Egregium (Latin for “Remarkable Theorem”) demonstrates, however, that no planar or flat map of the Earth can be perfect, even for a portion of the Earth’s surface. Every cartographic projection necessarily distorts at least some distances. The Mercator projection preserves angles but fails to preserve area.
The rival Gall–Peters projection, a configurable equal-area map projection, known as the equal-area cylindric or cylindrical equal-area projection, named after 19th century Scottish clergyman James Gall, and 20th century German historian Arno Peters, and unveiled in 1974 as the Peters World Map, is widely used in the British school system and is promoted by the United Nations Educational and Scientific Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Oxfam, the National Council of Churches, the Mennonite Central Committee and New Internationalist magazine because of its ability to communicate visually the actual relative sizes of the various regions of the planet. While the Peters World Map doesn’t enlarge areas as much as the Mercator projection, certain places appear stretched, horizontally near the poles, and vertically near the Equator.
“Mercator was ahead of his time, not living to see his discovery become fully employed, but ‘by the eighteenth century the projection had been adopted almost universally by European navigators,’” TIME wrote in 2013.
Mercator was born on March 5, 1512, in the town of Rupelmonde in Flanders, which is today part of Belgium. He was educated in the Netherlands and in 1544 was charged with heresy on the basis of his sympathy for Protestantism and suspicions about his frequent travels.
He was held in custody in prison for seven months before the charges were dropped.
Mercator died on Dec. 2, 1594.
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