wryan:

maptacular:

The Mapmaker’s Dilemma 

“If you’re over 50, chances are the obligatory world maps hanging in your classrooms were based on the Mercator projection. You probably remember it: Greenland, which is 14 times smaller than Africa, appears to be the same size as the continent. And Europe looks twice as large as South America, instead of half the size, as it really is.”

Read more at NorthCoastJournal.com

This is one of my favorite map projections (maybe number two on my list), and it’s called the Dymaxion map. Buckminster Fuller first drew it in the 1940s.

I like it for several reasons: first and foremost, it looks dramatic and different from every other map you see. Second, unlike certain other map projections, it accurately represents the size of the continents. (It is impossible to take a three dimensional object such as Earth and put it on a two dimensional scale without skewing. This is why Greenland looks bigger than Africa on a lot of maps, even though it is 13.94 times smaller than it. I have written about the politics of map projections before and won’t bore you with an argument that hasn’t changed.) Third, what I like about this one is it shows how connected the world really is.

I’m not going to go on with some hoohah about “~we are all one and we are all connected~,” but it’s interesting to look at the world less as seven distinct and separate continents (not the least because Afro-Eurasia is technically one big landmass that encompasses 85% of the world’s population) and instead as one big and evolving Pangaea. I am not too good at science, but as I understand it some very smart people have theorized that the continents constantly come together and then break apart.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that on a geological scale, humanity hasn’t been around for very long. We’re like some really crappy tenants in an apartment building who’ve completely ignored the terms of our lease, and when we’ve blown ourselves to smithereens the planet and the continents will still be here.