Hence the idea was born to create a new projection that would have more ‘eye appeal’ compared to existing equal-area projections and to give it the catchy name Equal Earth,” the authors explained.Ī map projection is the two dimensional translation of the shape of the earth. “We searched for alternative equal-area map projections for world maps, but could not find any that met all our aesthetic criteria. Our message – that Gall-Peters is not the only equal-area projection – was not getting through,” the authors wrote in a recently published paper in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. “The reaction among cartographers to this announcement, and others like it in the years past, was predictable: frustration. The three cartographers created the Equal Earth map in response to public schools in Boston adopting another map, the Gall-Peter map projection, to depict the true sizes of the continents in 2017. The height-to-width aspect ratio of 1:2.05458 is very close to the natural ratio of a sphere and pole lines are 0.59247 times the length of the equator. Instead, they mimic the appearance of the elliptical arcs of the globe, making the new map visually appealing. The longitudes of the new map are equally spaced and do not excessively curve outwards. However, it heavily distorts the size of the continents, making Africa look tiny and Greenland and Russia stretched out. The standard map projection, called the Mercator projection, was developed in 1569 and is still widely used. The new map, called the Equal Earth Map Projection, was developed by Bojan Savric from the Environmental Systems Research Institute in California Tom Patterson, executive director of North American Cartographic Information Society based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Bernhard Jenny from Monash University in Melbourne. An equal area map projection retains the size of the continents as on earth, but distorts the shape or the angle of the landmass A collaboration of three cartographers has developed a new representation of the world map, which is aesthetically pleasing and depicts the true sizes of all continents without distorting their shapes too much.
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