Slight variations in Earth’s gravity field cause permanent hills and valleys in the ocean’s surface of over 300 feet relative to an ellipsoid.Īdditionally, the shape of the Earth is always changing. Sea level itself is even irregularly shaped. Mountains rising almost 30,000 feet and ocean trenches diving over 36,000 feet (compared to sea level) further distort the shape of the Earth. This is due to the centrifugal force created by the earth’s constant rotation. Our planet is pudgier at the equator than at the poles by about 70,000 feet. However, even an ellipsoid does not adequately describe the Earth’s unique and ever-changing shape. “This warped worldview might even bias you, subconsciously, to under-appraise most of the developing world.While the Earth appears to be round when viewed from the vantage point of space, it is actually closer to an ellipsoid. “If you have a Mercator projection on your classroom walls, for example, you may grow up thinking Greenland is the size of Africa (not even close) or Alaska looms larger than Mexico (also nope).” Sokol wrote. The act of converting a three-dimensional object into something two-dimensional inevitably introduces distortions. Joshua Sokol of The New York Times writes that no flat map of a round world can be perfectly accurate. We’re proposing a radically different kind of map.” (via EarthSky) Previous world maps “We’re doing this to break a record, to make the flat map with the least error possible. adds that the new map features smaller distance errors than any other single-sided flat map.Īccording to EarthSky, Gott compares his team’s radical map-making approach to the way Dick Fosbury introduced a new high jumping technique to break records at the 1968 Olympics. While the new circular map features a few spacial distortions, reports that it doesn’t downsize or enlarge the areas of certain oceans or landmasses like other two-dimensional maps. Flat world maps have all kinds of distortions (hello, Africa is actually 14x the size of Greenland!), but these new coasters are more accurate than most /QmntLm7Agv- Laura Geggel February 23, 2021
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