Africa Just Got Bigger — MUCH Bigger

[Africa on the traditional world map based on the Mercator projection, left, and on the 2018 Equal Earth map, right.]

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UN Votes to Adopt New World Map That Shows Africa's True Scale

To phase out traditional map that depicts continent as similar size to Greenland

The UN General Assembly officially retired the 16th-century Mercator projection in favor of one based on the more accurate 2018 Equal Earth design (below).

The Mercator layout was introduced by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 to help sailors navigate the seas. Almost five centuries later, it remains the global standard.

Because of its projection style, however, regions near the equator appear significantly smaller than they are, whereas high-latitude areas look much larger. For example, the Mercator map shows Africa as being similar in size to Greenland, but Africa is 14 times larger [my bold italics] than the Danish territory.

"You could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico, and much of Europe into Africa and still have land to spare," says a petition on Change.org.

[via the Guardian]

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I can't end without a note on the terrible Blogger interface and experience: this post, which on Typepad would have taken about 10 minutes total, took me over an hour on Blogger with at least 20 revisions — and it still doesn't look nearly as finished as it should.