Map projections lab

map projections lab

mercator 1569
Gerardus Mercator, Flanders
Devised for maritime navigation. Preserves angles and shapes but inflates area toward the poles. albers 1805
Heinrich C. Albers, Germany
Conic projection built for accurate area within one mid-latitude band. Still the standard choice for regional maps like the continental US. gall-peters 1855
James Gall, Scotland
Equal-area cylindrical projection, re-presented by German historian Arno Peters in 1973 as a fairness-driven alternative to Mercator. dymaxion 1943
Buckminster Fuller, US
Unfolds the globe onto an icosahedron, spreading distortion across fold seams instead of concentrating it at the poles. robinson 1963
Arthur H. Robinson, US
Compromise projection built to look right rather than measure right. Adopted by National Geographic from 1988 to 1998. equal earth 2018
Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny, Slovenia, US and Switzerland
The equal-area projection the UN endorsed in 2026 as a Mercator alternative, designed to look as natural as Robinson while keeping true relative size.

limits grid land

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Mathematical choices are also political. Representing a spherical object on a two-dimensional surface is not an easy task. So much so that there are hundreds of map projections, each choosing to prioritize different properties, such as shape, distance, or area.

Drag and move any shape to observe its distortions across the projections. Start with Greenland and Africa, add more with the controls above: a specific country, a whole continent, or a plain geometric shape to see how the globe itself warps them.