25/09/2025
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25/09/2025
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In school, I was, and still am, excellent in geography and history, but very poor in Arabic grammar and mathematics, and average in the other subjects. The world map has been my passion ever since I bought one from Al-Ruwaih Bookstore in the 1950s. I would look at it every night, yearning to visit the major cities. I have since fulfilled many of those dreams, with only a few places left unvisited, places I probably never will see.
Who was behind the creation of the world map, the only one most of us seem to know? Through research, I discovered the following interesting facts: The modern map we use today was created by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. His “projection” became the standard for maritime navigation because it represents lines of constant compass bearing as straight lines, which is crucial for sailors.
However, the Mercator map lacks geographical accuracy. Since the Earth is spherical and maps are flat, a method was needed to project the globe onto a two-dimensional surface. This projection inevitably introduced distortions in the shape and size of continents and countries, as well as in distance and direction. The Mercator projection, like any cylindrical projection, wraps the globe within a cylinder that touches the Earth at the equator.
All geographic features and points are projected onto the surface of this cylinder. Once projected, the cylinder is unrolled and flattened to form a rectangular map, with vertical lines representing longitude and horizontal lines representing latitude. These lines are parallel and evenly spaced. However, while the lines of latitude are straight and parallel, the spacing between them is uneven. They diverge as one moves closer to the poles. The more one moves toward the poles, the greater the distortion in the cylindrical projection.
This is where the importance of the Mercator projection lies, as it works to reduce this distortion. The Mercator projection is originally a standard cylindrical projection, but the designer shortened the distance between the lines of latitude by a specific percentage as one moves toward the poles. This adjustment makes a straight line from any point on the map to the pole nearly equal to the actual distance, after accounting for the map’s scale. This also makes compass bearings more accurate on the map. For this reason, maritime navigators always carry a Mercator map with them. As is well known, the Mercator projection enlarges landmasses that are far from the equator.
As a result, regions such as Europe, Greenland, and Iceland appear much larger than they actually are, while Africa and South America appear significantly smaller than their actual size. These huge differences in size between Africa and Iceland, for example, have led some to believe in a conspiracy aimed at exaggerating the size of northwestern lands at the expense of others. This, however, is absurd.
New maps are now available, designed with the Winkel Tripel projection, which offers better balance and less distortion in both area and shape. The problem of aligning all calculations and drawings between a simplified, flat sheet of paper and a spherical shape remains a dilemma, perhaps even an unsolvable one. The Tissot Indicatrix is a popular tool for illustrating how projections distort local areas. It shows how the size and shape of a small circle on the globe change in different regions of the map.
By Ahmad alsarraf
email: [email protected]
email: [email protected]
