Essentially the most commonly used world map could soon get a revamp to point out the true scale of the African continent.
The African Union (AU) represents 55 countries on the continent, and is backing a brand new campaign to vary the famous Sixteenth-century Mercator map, which they are saying doesn’t show the dimensions of Africa appropriately.
Areas like South America and Africa are skewed barely on the map, which they claim undermines the importance of the continent while giving America and Europe a bigger map.
Essentially the most commonly used map, the Mercator, dates back to the 1500s, but changing the dimensions of the map is harder than it appears.
The Mercator Projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, shows the northern hemisphere enlarged in size with North America and Europe larger than South America and Africa.
But Nick Millea, a map curator at Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, told The Telegraph: ’It’s the age-old problem of attempting to project a spherical object onto a flat surface: you possibly can’t do it.
‘Something has got to offer to provide you with a picture.’
AU Commission deputy chairperson Selma Malika Haddadi told Reuters it’s not only a map.
She said a brand new map would help ‘reclaim Africa’s rightful place on the worldwide stage’, adding that the skewed size influences education and policy.
The brand new initiative, dubbed ‘Correct the Map’, hopes the most recent 2018 ‘Equal Earth’ map may very well be used as an alternative choice to the Mercator map.
‘In a world where size is commonly equated with power, misrepresenting Africa’s true scale reinforces harmful misconceptions about its geopolitical and economic significance,’ Correct the Map said.
‘You may fit the US, China, India, Japan, Mexico and far of Europe into Africa and still have land to spare.
‘Yet, many of the world continues to favour this distorted map, misrepresenting Africa’s scale and diminishing its significance.’
The group has already submitted a request to vary the map to the UN geospatial body, often called the UN-GGIM. The applying will likely be reviewed and must be approved by a committee of wide-ranging experts on the matter.
The true size of Africa is indeed skewed barely on modern maps – corrected versions show that the continent is far larger than it appears.
China, the US, India and all of continental Europe fit inside the African continent.
The ‘Equal Earth’ map, which was first unveiled in 2018, was designed to represent the relative sizes of different land areas without sacrificing a ‘visually pleasing and balanced’ aesthetic.
‘It’s astonishing to me (though not having given it much thought frankly), that we’re still designing recent global map projections,’ climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute said on the time.
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