What if someone told you that the World Map you know so well has been successfully used to give our children and ourselves an inaccurate picture of the world and our place within it?

According to Directions Magazine :

The popular Mercator mapping projection – the most commonly used in the world – was created in the 16th Century as a navigation aid. It may have worked well for sailors, but is an inappropriate education tool because it distorts the actual size and relationship of land masses.

When the Mercator projection was created, the custom among map-makers was to place the map-maker’s country – in this case, Germany – at the center of the map. The Equator is placed 2/3 of the way down the map rather than halfway down. This arrangement depicts Europe as being larger than South America. In reality, South America is almost twice the size of Europe. Alaska is appears to be three times larger than Mexico, although Mexico actually is larger than Alaska. On a Mercator map, Greenland looks larger than China, even though China actually is four times larger than Greenland.

One of the more popular alternative seems to be the Peter’s Projection :

Introduced by historian Dr. Arno Peters in 1974, this map immediately caused a whirlwind of debate and controversy. The Peters map, unlike the Mercator map, keeps the land size/area true and sacrifices land shape. Thus, Africa, India, and South America are shown in their true proportions to the rest of the world, and the Northern Hemisphere no longer has the false size advantage over the Southern Hemisphere.

An article on About.com is not very kind to Peter’s Projection either, and puts forth a number of arguments why we need to choose carefully from all the options available.

Whatever be the right answer, it cannot be denied that the world as we know it is actually not they way we knew it ! Looks like its time we adopted the X-Files maxim : Trust no one.

See Also: True size of Africa