Look at the map that hung in your geography class and answer without overthinking: how many times could Greenland fit inside Africa? The intuition says one, perhaps one and a half. Africa is fourteen times larger. The continent measures 30.3 million square kilometers and the island 2.16 million. In the map that almost all of us memorized, the two silhouettes look the same size.
Fourteen Times Africa, and No One Would Say So
The map you learned isn’t broken: it’s doing something different from what you think. These five facts explain the mismatch.
- Greenland covers 7% of Africa, even though the two silhouettes on school maps look like twins.
- The 1569 map was designed for navigation: its appeal was that a straight line on the paper corresponded to a constant compass heading.
- The surface inflates with latitude, in proportion to 1 divided by the cosine squared.
- No flat projection preserves areas, shapes, and distances at once: it is a theorem proven in 1827.
- Equal Earth distorts shapes rather than areas to maintain true scale.
That mismatch arrived at the United Nations General Assembly on September 4, 2026. The Assembly adopted Resolution A/80/L.104 by 164 votes in favor, one against (the United States) and six abstentions. The text, driven by African countries, urges the use of equal-area projections, and in particular the so-called Equal Earth, wherever the relative sizes of continents matter: school atlases, textbooks, and media.
It is worth stating as early as possible what the resolution is not. The text recommends, it does not compel. It is not a rule, it does not force any state, publisher, or school to remove anything, it does not ban the Mercator projection, and it imposes no deadline. Its force is symbolic and educational, not legal.
A Map Made for Navigating, Not for Comparing
Gerardus Mercator published his map in 1569 and titled it, without ambiguity, “A New and Enlarged Description of the Earth for the Use of Navigators.” The objective was nautical, not descriptive. A ship maintaining a fixed compass course traces, on the Earth’s surface, a troublesome curve—the loxodrome—and Mercator found a way to draw that curve as a straight line.
To achieve this, he had to stretch parallels toward the poles and then stretch the meridians by the same amount, so that local angles remained intact. The result is a conformal projection: small shapes are easy to recognize, angles are preserved, and navigation becomes trivial. In exchange, the scale ceases to be uniform, and the farther you go from the equator, the more the landmass expands.
Mercator did not draw the world badly. He drew well a navigation tool that we later used for centuries for a task that was not his to perform.
That leap, from the nautical chart to the classroom map, is the true focus of the debate. The tension between form and area has deep roots, as shown by the two ways of drawing the same world that Mercator and Gall-Peters popularized. The latter, spread in the 1970s, corrected areas but compressed and stretched the continents until they became hardly recognizable.
Why No Flat Map Can Be Truly Faithful
Here is the idea you need to understand above all, and it requires no mathematics. A sphere cannot be laid flat on a plane without tearing or stretching it. Try pressing the peel of an orange against the table: it will either tear somewhere or deform. There is no third option, and there is a deep reason for that.
Carl Friedrich Gauss proved it in 1827 in what he called his Theorema Egregium, his “remarkable theorem.” The curvature of a surface is intrinsic: it does not depend on how you place it in space. A sphere and a plane have different curvatures, so there is no way to go from one to the other while preserving everything. Any flat map must choose what to sacrifice.
Mercator sacrifices the surface and equal-area projections sacrifice the shape. Others distribute the error between both so that neither becomes glaring, and there are those who have computed a flat map with the minimal possible error by combining several criteria at once. None wins in everything, because you cannot.
Equal Earth, introduced in 2018 by Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny, is a pseudocylindrical equal-area projection. It preserves areas exactly and renders continents with a familiar appearance, close to that of the well-known Robinson projection. That is its strength. It is not more “true” than Mercator: it is more honest about size and less faithful about shape.
What Exactly Does the Resolution Say, and What Has Been Overstated
The adopted text recommends broadening the use of equal-area projections in contexts where relative size matters. Nothing more, and nothing less. Headlines claiming to ban Mercator go beyond what was voted, just as those assuming an automatic change of the world map do.
It is also not advisable to confuse projection with borders. India backed the resolution reaffirming its sovereignty over Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh: political cartographic disagreements remain exactly where they were. Changing the projection does not move a single disputed line.
A General Assembly recommendation does not compel anyone. Its real effect depends on editors, ministries, and platforms choosing to follow it.
There is also a front that the resolution does not touch. Digital maps will continue to use Mercator, in its spherical variant, for technical reasons: it preserves local angles and fits well with the square-tiling system that makes zoom possible. In navigation and distribution, it will continue to prevail, and rightly so.
What Changes If the Map Changes
First, an intuition. Those who grow up with distorted proportions inherit a deformed planet: Europe appears comparable to South America when the latter is almost twice as large. Just check the real size of your country to see it, or recall that the planet’s largest island accounts for less than 8% of Africa.
That visual distortion has shaped the collective perception of the world is a reasonable and widely repeated reading, but it should be stated carefully. The experimental literature measuring that effect is scarce. That the map contributed to consolidating a Eurocentric image of the planet is defensible as history; to claim that it caused it, to what extent, and with what political consequences, would go further than what anyone has measured.
Secondly, a huge and slow project. Changing the default map requires redoing atlases, textbooks, infographics, and graphic databases. There is no budget allocated, no deadline, and no obligation. The resolution opens a conversation; it does not close it.
The question isn’t which map is the true one, but which map serves what purpose. One for navigation, another for comparison, and none for everything.
