The popular Robinson projection and Equal Earth projection have similar overall shapes. Source: Taylor & Francis

Size matters, especially in cartography. The familiar Mercator projection map has served as a geographic reference and educational tool for centuries, but it underestimates the size of countries and continents in the Southern Hemisphere and exaggerates those in the Northern Hemisphere. So, Africa and South America appear (relatively) small, while the magnitude of countries like Canada, Greenland and those in Scandinavia is overstated.

A new map has been designed to restore accurate scale to our planetary sphere. The development of the new 2D projection map started with the Robinson Projection Map, which was adopted by the National Geographic Society as their map of choice in 1988.

The Equal Earth depiction is not quite an equal-area projection like the Gall-Peters projection map, in which the continents are shown more accurately in size but are distorted in shape, or a conformal projection like the Mercator projection map, but offers a more precise compromise between the two. The map makers described Equal Earth as a pseudo-cylindrical projection map that offers a relatively realistic view of the Earth in 2D.

Cartographers from Australia’s Monash University, Esri Inc. and the U.S. National Park Service contributed to this research, which is published in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science.