But although this angular layout makes navigation easier, accuracy and bias are major disadvantages that can't be ignored. Namely, the Mercator projection minimizes non-European or American countries and continents while enlarging privileged world powers. Africa, for example, is depicted as smaller than North America when it is, in reality, three times larger. Many feel that these discrepancies reflect racism and prejudice against underprivileged and developing countries.
Pro-Peters folks often argue that this projection merely advantages colonial powers while disadvantaging others. The Mercator map has always been inadequate as a world map due to its rectangular grid and shape, but geographically illiterate publishers once found it useful for designing wall, atlas, and book maps, even maps found in newspapers published by non-geographers.
It became the standard map projection for most applications and is still cemented as the mental map of most westerners today. Fortunately, over the past few decades, the Mercator projection has fallen into disuse by most reliable sources. In a s study, two British geographers discovered that the Mercator map did not exist among dozens of atlases examined. Though some major map companies with less than reputable credentials still produce some maps using the Mercator projection, these are widely dismissed.
As Mercator maps were already spiraling into obsoletion, a historian attempted to speed up this process by presenting a new map. German historian and journalist Arno Peters called a press conference in to announce his "new" map projection that treated each country fairly by representing their areas more accurately. The Peters projection map uses a rectangular coordinate system that shows parallel lines of latitude and longitude.
In reality, the Mercator map was never intended to be used as a wall map and by the time Peters started complaining about it, the Mercator map was well on its way out of fashion anyway. In essence, the Peters projection was a response to a question that had already been answered. Skilled at marketing, Arno claimed that his map displayed third world countries more subjectively than the popular but highly distorted Mercator projection map.
While the Peters projection does almost represent land area accurately, all map projections distort the shape of the earth, a sphere. This reasoning has been picked up by many educational institutions and similarly concerned groups. The downside of the Peters projection map is that to many it looks different and unfamiliar leading people to believe that it is less accurate than it actually is.
Also it suffers from extreme distortion at the polar regions making it useless for all those interested in the coldest places on earth. This website requires cookies to provide all of its features. For more information on what data is contained in the cookies, please see our Privacy Policy page. To accept cookies from this site, please click the Allow button below. Need some help?
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Current Stock:. The Peters Projection Advanced World political map from Academia Maps is ideal for teaching world geography or world history lessons to students in grades 6 through This map was designed using the Gall-Peters projection, which is an equal-area map projection that accurately depicts the sizes of countries in relation each other.
It is considered a good alternative to the commonly used Mercator projection which increasingly inflates the sizes of countries the further you move from the equator. This is most noticeably observed with Greenland appearing larger than Africa on a Mercator map despite being 14 times smaller.
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