The multi-step process preserves the true dimensions of the continents by angling them outward instead of stretching them, maintaining the illusion that they’re all laid out vertically like we’re used to. Hajime Narukawa, a Tokyo-based architect and artist, broke the globe up into 96 regions and folded it into a tetrahedron and then a pyramid before finally flattening it into a two-dimensional sheet. The 2016 winner of Japan’s prestigious Good Design, designers figured out how to translate our spherical world into a rectangular box. We may finally have a faithful flat map, however. What Is the Most Accurate Map of the World? Areas near both the equator and prime meridian are accurate, but the distortion gets worse the further you go from either.Īrmadillo Projection (Credit: Daniel R. It succeeds in presenting a more accurate view of the poles, but at the cost of misshapen continents and bent meridians.
This map bowed out the equator in an attempt to replicate the topography of a sphere and avoid stretching out areas far from the equator. Here are a few of the different ways cartographers have tried to depict the Earth. By calculating how much each circle deforms, it is possible to determine how much the map is pulling and stretching the continents out of shape at that point.
Called Tissot’s indicatrix, the equation takes the form of circles placed at regular intervals across a map. The problem was so widespread that a French mathematician even developed an eponymous equation to quantify the degree of distortion that a world map experienced. Some were made for specific purposes, while others just tried to find the cartographic sweet spot. Maps are compromises between distorting the angles of latitude and longitude lines and the relative areas of the continents and oceans. Why is an Accurate World Map Hard to Come By?įor centuries, cartographers have made numerous attempts to account for the inconsistency while trying to recreate the most accurate map of the Earth. But the AuthaGraph may be the pinnacle of accuracy. That’s the difficulty with stretching a sphere to fit a rectangle, and for centuries cartographers have struggled to balance maintaining straight latitudinal lines with the preservation of perspective. In reality though, Africa is larger than all of North America, and the Antarctic is about as big as Australia.
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