When Cartographers Gave the World a Fairer Shape

Walk into almost any classroom or glance at the standard world map on a phone app, and you’ll notice something odd if you stare long enough. Greenland looks nearly as wide as Africa. Alaska seems to dwarf Mexico. For most of us, that flat blue-and-green rectangle becomes the unshakable image of our planet. Yet the truth is, Africa could swallow Greenland more than fourteen times over, and Alaska is only about one-fifth the size of Brazil.
The reason we grew up with such a distorted sense of scale comes down to a problem mathematicians have wrestled with for centuries: you cannot flatten a sphere onto a plane without bending something out of shape. The Mercator projection, created in 1569, solved the problem for sailors by preserving angles and compass directions, but it stretched landmasses farther from the equator to unsettling proportions. Europe and North America gained visual prominence, while Africa and South America were quietly shrunk into the background.
For a long time, this was accepted as a necessary compromise. Then, in 2018, a team of cartographers—Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny—introduced a new way of looking at the globe. They called it the Equal Earth projection.
The name is not just a poetic gesture. It refers to a specific mathematical property: equal-area. Every country and continent is shown at its true relative size. What sets Equal Earth apart from older equal-area attempts, like the Peters projection, is that it doesn’t make the world look like a torn and stretched rubber sheet. The continents keep a natural, rounded shape. The parallels curve gently, giving the map a calm, balanced appearance that feels familiar without being deceptive.
Later that same year, the National Geographic Society made a quiet but symbolic switch. After two decades of using the Winkel Tripel projection, they adopted Equal Earth for their reference maps. It was a recognition that a map meant for general readers should not silently exaggerate the size of some nations while diminishing others.
Of course, no flat map is perfect. Equal Earth preserves area, but it still distorts distances, directions, and the shapes of things near the poles to some degree. If you need to navigate a ship, you wouldn’t reach for it. But for understanding the relative footprint of human civilizations, it offers something previous world maps often lacked: restraint.
There is also a subtle cultural shift embedded in this change. Maps are not neutral. The image of the world we hang on our walls influences how we perceive power, population, and possibility. When Africa appears as a small footnote at the bottom of the page, it subtly reinforces outdated hierarchies. A projection that restores the continent’s massive, central presence does more than correct a geometry error—it adjusts the lens through which we see the world.
The next time you glance at a world map, take a second to see which projection it uses. If the countries sit in their true proportions, with Africa commanding the space it deserves, you’re likely looking at an idea that finally took hold in the 21st century. The Earth, it turns out, is better represented when we let it be equal.