So right now, here at the start of September 2026, we have a lot of people on the internet losing their shit about the UN vote regarding how we represent the world on maps, specifically moving away from the legendary and infamous Mercator projection for general educational use and encouraging equal area projections such as "Equal Earth".
And, as usual, people are reading headlines and running with them.
First, some facts. The Mercator projection dates to 1569. It was created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, and one of the major reasons it became so important was navigation. It has a very specific and genuinely useful mathematical property: lines of constant compass bearing, called "rhumb lines", appear as straight lines on the map. That's a pretty fucking useful feature when you're navigating a ship across an ocean, feel me?
The problem is that you cannot take the surface of a globe and flatten it into a rectangle without distorting something. There is no perfect flat map of Earth. Different projections preserve different things at the expense of other things. Mercator does a very good job preserving local angles and shapes, which is part of what makes it useful for navigation, but the tradeoff is that area becomes increasingly distorted the farther you get from the equator. Places at high latitudes get enormous, basically.
So yes, Greenland looks fucking gigantic on a Mercator map. Africa doesn't. And yes, that's wildly misleading if you're trying to understand how big these places actually are.
This is where the current conversation starts getting a little silly, though, because I've seen people retroactively describing the Mercator projection itself as basically a deliberate European colonial scheme to make Europe look important and Africa look small.
Guys. We gotta relax a little bit.
Look, there is absolutely no shortage of things European colonial powers did that deserve condemnation. Colonization, conquest, exploitation, slavery, resource extraction and the destruction or suppression of cultures are extremely well documented. Nobody needs to manufacture additional reasons to criticize European colonialism. There are lots.
But the Mercator projection was not invented simply to make Europe look bigger and Africa look smaller. Its distortion follows latitude because of the mathematics of the projection. Put something at a sufficiently high latitude and Mercator makes it look huge. Put it near the equator and its area is represented much more closely to scale. That's not a defense of colonialism. It's fucking geometry, folks.
Now, here's where the conversation gets much more interesting.
Just because Mercator wasn't created as some nefarious colonial propaganda campaign doesn't mean centuries of looking at Mercator flavored world maps couldn't have affected how people perceive the world.
That's a completely legitimate question right there!
If you grow up repeatedly seeing northern countries and regions represented as enormous while Africa and other equatorial regions look comparatively smaller, could that affect your intuitive understanding of their importance, scale or place in the world? Sure, that's worth studying and discussing. There are scholars and institutions making exactly that argument. Whether that translates neatly into measurable social or political bias is a much bigger question, and I'm not remotely qualified to settle it.
But we need to distinguish between the consequences of using a projection and the historical reason the projection was created. Those aren't the same thing.
And for the record, the UN didn't simply announce, "Here's the new official map of Earth, everybody throw your old maps away." On September 4, 2026, the General Assembly voted 164–1, with six abstentions, for a nonbinding resolution encouraging greater use of equal-area projections, including Equal Earth, particularly where accurately comparing the relative sizes of continents matters. The United States was the only country to vote against it. Wheeeee #goteam #ffs
The resolution itself acknowledges that different projections have different purposes and specifically recognizes the historical usefulness of Mercator for navigation. It isn't banning Mercator. It isn't claiming that Equal Earth is somehow a magical distortion free representation of a spherical planet. No such flat map exists.
And I'm actually glad this discussion is happening. If you're teaching geography or showing people a general world map, there's a damn good argument that relative land area should be represented accurately. Africa is enormous, and generations of people have grown up with a pretty shitty intuitive sense of just how enormous it actually is if all they've seen is Mercator things.
What bothers me is watching a complicated subject get flattened into another social-media morality play where everybody see a headline, and loses their shit.
You don't have to choose between "European colonialism was fucking horrible" and "the history and mathematics of the Mercator projection are more complicated than this meme says."
Both can be true, peeps.
So before you get furious about this one, read a little bit. Read about Mercator. Read about map projections. Read about why every attempt to represent a globe on a flat surface necessarily distorts something. Read about Equal Earth and why equal area projections are useful. Read what the UN actually voted on instead of what somebody's headline says they voted on.
There is a whole host of shit to be pissed off about when it comes to European colonialism. Make no mistake.
But if we're going to be pissed off about history, we should at least try to get the history right.