direction, and the Mercator projection or some derivative remains the basis for
many, if not most, nautical charts used by oceangoing traffic even today. On the
other hand, the Mercator projection tends to distort the relative size ofregions
especially toward the poles, while the latter of course are not represented on the
projection. In reality, the Mercator projection shows areas that lie in equatorial
regions close to their true proportions but, when employed for a world map, leads
to misrepresentations of the actual geographic relationships. The classic example
is the comparison of the relative sizes of Greenland and South America on the
Mercator projection. Greenland, located at a northerly latitude, is shown to have
about the same area as South America, when in reality South America is more than
eight times larger. The Mercator projection then is a poor choice for teaching
regional geography in most cases.
A better choice for most geography teachers and students is the equal area pro-
jection. The question of accurate representation of regions and countries on maps
is not merely academic. In the 1970s, the German activist and academic Arno
Peters claimed that continued widespread use of the Mercator projection in text-
books and academic publications was in fact an indication of cultural imperialism,
and in essence a subtle attempt to undermine thecultural identityof peoples in
the economically developing world. Peters claimed to have developed a new pro-
jection that corrected the misuse of maps based on the Mercator projection, called
the “Peters projection,” which was actually nearly identical to a much earlier pro-
jection developed by James Gall, a Scottish cartographer. Although Peters’s claims
about the accuracy of his map were exaggerated, his main point concerning the
appropriate use of map projections, and the implications of such use, was well
taken and generated much discussion in the cartographic community and among
geographers in general. The Peters projection, ironically, is not widely used today,
but several well-known equal area projections of this type are frequently encoun-
tered. Albers’s equal area map is a conic projection centered on two standard lines
of latitude located in the middle latitudes. The Albers’s projection is especially
useful for regions like the United States and Europe, where the east-west distance
is greater than the north-south extent of the region. Other common equal area pro-
jections include Mollweide’s equal area and Lambert’s equal area projections,
both of which are frequently used in atlases.
A map that is to be used for plotting the course of a moving object should be
based on a conformal projection. Conformal projections, because of their math-
ematical properties, preserve the true angular relationship between points on the
map. This type of projection may be used to accurately calculate direction and dis-
tance, properties that are crucial to moving from one location to another as repre-
sented on the map. The aforementioned Mercator projection is a prime example of
a conformal projection, and others would include topographical sheets and
Map Projections 221