Joel Helmer knows his way around maps.
In a world where people can pin their location from their phone and have a friendly voice give them directions without having to refold a cumbersome paper map in the car, the Concordia University geography professor said more traditional maps – especially globes – add spatial context to situations that step-by-step instructions cannot.
The United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 4 voted 164-1 to endorse a new world map that depicts the size of some continents and countries more accurately instead of the commonly used Mercator world map. Only the United States voted against the endorsement, though six other countries abstained.
While Helmer is pleased to see the world offered a map that more accurately depicts the size and scale of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, Africa and other locations, the vote may be mostly symbolic and may not change which maps are used.
The Associated Press reported that the vote was the result of a campaign led by some African countries and advocates. The vote does not ban other maps, but encourages use of a map using the “Equal Earth projection.”
From political perspectives, some people see the new map as a way to move away from colonialism and western culture, while others say there are better things to be working on.
“This topic is not new. This just brought it to people’s attention in a unique way with the United Nations vote,” Helmer said Sept. 11.
Because Earth is a sphere, when people try to make a two-dimensional depiction of its land masses – or projections as the cartographers call them – things get wonky.
“The cartographer’s goal is to take round Earth and flatten it on the map,” Helmer said.
Helmer explains this occurrence by having students think of an orange peel. If the peel is removed from the orange whole and a person attempts to lay the peel out flat, it needs finessing. Either some parts of the peel have to be pushed over here, or pulled this way or cut to make it lay flat.
“Whoever is designing the projection is choosing which distortion” the Earth’s map will have, Helmer said.
The commonly used Mercator projection map was created in 1569 by Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer, and was intended to assist trade ships sailing the seas navigate to their destinations. The contexts of the sizes and accurate locations for the continents and islands were not necessarily of great value at the time.
Instead Mercator’s projection kept the lines of Earth’s latitude and longitude in place.
“That was really an amazing project,” Helmer said. “He preserved direction on this map.
“At that time people were beginning to explore the world by ship and they needed a map to allow them to navigate.”
It was important to them to be able to identify some straight lines between Point A and Point B. They were focused, primarily on the areas on each side of the Equator, sort of the middle band of Earth.
On the Mercator map, Alaska, Canada, Russia and Greenland are shown with exaggerated size, he said. The effect appeared as people look toward the South Pole on the map, too. As an example, Helmer noted it would take 14 accurately sized Greenlands to match the true size of Africa on a map, but on the Mercator map, Greenland looks larger than it is.
“It was a good map for navigating.” Helmer said. “It has been fascinating how this map just stuck for all these centuries.”
The Equal Earth projection also faced the problem of distortion when shifting the Earth’s sphere to a flat map.
While it more accurately shows the size of different continents and land masses and their relationship to others, it distorts the shape of some land masses. For example, he said, the African continent is shown in the right place and size, but its overall shape is longer and narrower than it appears on spherical maps.
It is not the first map to portray the size of things more accurately. Helmer said there have been hundreds of flat map projections over the centuries, each with distortions in either direction, area or shape. He also likes the 1963 Robinson projection map of the world.
“As long as people realize – whatever map they are looking at – there is going to be some distortion,” Helmer said.
Today cartographers have tools like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to help them translate the sphere to a flat image.
But Helmer said the issue of turning the sphere into a flat image remains.
“Even with modern computer-generated maps, you still have to choose a projection,” he said.
Often they factor in the uses their map is being created for and where they are located to do that.
Helmer is enjoying the conversations around the Mercator and Equal Earth projections but says the best view of the world is always going to be on a globe.
Helmer has been at Concordia since 2007, where he chairs the Department of History, Geography, Intercultural Studies and Modern Languages. He is a CUNE alum with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education. He earned a master’s degree in geography at the University of Akron and a Ph.D. in environmental science from Oklahoma State University.
“A lot of people don’t understand what geographers teach,” he said.
Geography influences all aspects of life and where you sit on a map may influence what you eat, how you dress, your religion, the animals around you and the plants you grow.
“Maps are just tools that help you simplify the study of the world,” Helmer said.
“I always like teaching moments. I think this is a teaching moment.”
