The Cartographer's Lie

Pull up any map in your mind — a world map, the kind that hung in a classroom, Greenland enormous and green in the upper left, Antarctica a white band across the bottom. Hold that image. Greenland looks roughly the size of South America, maybe a bit smaller. Antarctica appears to be the largest landmass on earth. Now consider that South America is actually nine times larger than Greenland, and that Antarctica, while genuinely a large continent, is dwarfed by Asia in reality. What you are looking at in that classroom map is not the world. It is a decision about which lies are acceptable to tell in order to make a map useful. The problem is geometric and unavoidable. The earth is a sphere. A map is flat. You cannot peel an orange and lay the skin flat without tearing it. The same is true of the earth's surface — to project it onto a plane, something must give. You can preserve angle. You can preserve area. You can preserve some shapes in some places.