After our discussion Tuesday, I began to do some research on my own. While searching for some interactive inaccurate maps, I found a blog that boldly declared to me that every map I had ever seen was radically wrong. The blogger began to explain that one of his co-workers mentioned a thing to him called the Mercator project. Being unfamiliar with the term, as was I, the blogger browsed the term “Mercator.”
As Cam Bard previously noted during his discussion, it is impossible to represent a three dimensional world on a two dimensional scale. Apparently, a cartographer from the 1500s named Gerard Mercator created the ovular map that we recognize today. In an attempt to preserve the shapes of the world’s countries, Mercator drew the countries as we commonly see them on the map. However, he did not account for the scaling with relation to the Equator. On most maps, countries and landforms appear larger and larger as they are placed farther from Equator. The blogger’s primary example was Greenland. The point was made that Greenland is roughly 60% smaller than we believe it to be according to modern maps.
A Mercator Puzzle was created to show how warped depictions are on most maps. It was quite intriguing to find that, according to the Mercator Puzzle, Greenland was roughly the size of the Democratic Republic of Congo (an average-sized country in the middle of Africa). The thing that stuck me after investigating the Mercator mystery was, how can the people who designed the Mercator Puzzle be so sure that their map predictions are accurate??