12/8/25 Show Notes--The Mercator Map

Hey there! We hope you enjoyed this week's show on the Mercator Projection, Gerardus Mercator's successful attempt to make a workable map for navigators. On the show, we talked about Mercator's brilliance in constructing a map that allowed navigation by drawing straight lines between points that were easy to plot. But the downside of the Mercator Projection is that it progressively distorts the size of landmasses the further you get from the Equator. This happens because Mercator was projecting a globe onto a flat surface and straightening out the angles between longitude and latitude. To do that, he had to stretch the distance between latitudes while maintaining the same distance between longitudes (meridians). You can see the problem below. Greenland looks about the size of Africa when it is, in reality, barely bigger than the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The United Kingdom looks just as big as Madagascar but it's only a third the size. And we won't even get into Antarctica.