Why All Maps Are Wrong 🗺️

Morning Map lovers!

All world maps are completely WRONG!

What am I talking about?

Well, imagine you're an ancient map maker… aka a Cartographer!

Now, everybody knows the Earth is a sphere…

But carrying around a big bulky spherical map everywhere would suck butt.

So you’ve been tasked with turning this globe map into a foldable flat map, like this:

But there’s a problem…

Turns out that's REALLY frickin hard!!!

Like mathematically impossible hard.

You can pull and stretch and tear it as much as you want, but it will never look flat…

So what's a mapmaker to do???

Enter: PROJECTION!

Simply take your globe map and project what's on it onto a flat surface, like this.

Then roll it out and… TADA you've got yourself a map!

But now there's another problem…

The shapes may be accurate, sure.

But the sizes? They’re WAY off.

Just look at Greenland and Africa.

About the same size, right?

Well, in reality, Greenland is like 14 times SMALLER than Africa!

For some reason, this map projection makes the poles a bit… INFLATED!

But it’s not just this map, it's ALL of them.

Every single way you could project a globe onto a rectangle is slightly off…

Maybe it sacrifices size for shape, like the one we found.

Or maybe it sacrifices shape for size like this one.

Or maybe it does a bit of both like all of these:

Really, the most accurate map is… just a globe.

Lol.

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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