What is a Mercator projection and why is it misleading?

Mercator maps distort the shape and relative size of continents, particularly near the poles. This is why Greenland appears to be similar in size to all of South America on Mercator maps, when in fact South America is more than eight times larger than Greenland.

What are the 3 advantages of the Mercator projection?

Advantages of Mercator’s projection: – preserves angles and therefore also shapes of small objects – close to the equator, the distortion of lengths and areas is insignificant – a straight line on the map corresponds with a constant compass direction, it is possible to sail and fly using a constant azimuth – simple …

What is Mercator projection method?

The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.

What does the Mercator projection show accurately?

Description. Mercator is a conformal cylindrical map projection that was originally created to display accurate compass bearings for sea travel. An additional feature of this projection is that all local shapes are accurate and correctly defined at infinitesimal scale. It was presented by Gerardus Mercator in 1569.

Why do we use Mercator projection?

This map, with its Mercator projection, was designed to help sailors navigate around the globe. They could use latitude and longitude lines to plot a straight route. Mercator’s projection laid out the globe as a flattened version of a cylinder. All the latitude and longitude lines intersected at 90-degree angles.

How is the Mercator map bias?

Mercator’s map distorts the actual size of landmasses, overinflating those near the North and South poles, reports National Geographic. On Mercator’s map, Greenland and South America appear nearly the same size, but South America is actually eight times larger.

What are the pros and cons of Mercator projection?

Advantage: The Mercator map projection shows the correct shapes of the continents and directions accurately. Disadvantage: The Mercator map projection does not show true distances or sizes of continents, especially near the north and south poles.

What is the main difference between Mercator and UTM projection?

The transverse Mercator map projection is an adaptation of the standard Mercator projection which flips the cylinder 90 degrees (transverse). The UTM projection flattens the sphere 60 times by shifting the cylinder central meridian 6° for each zone. This gives cartographers a map to work with always in meters.

What geometric properties does world Mercator preserve?

Mercator is a conformal map projection. Directions, angles, and shapes are maintained at infinitesimal scale. Any straight line drawn on this projection represents an actual compass bearing. These true direction lines are rhumb lines and generally do not describe the shortest distance between points.

What are the pros and cons of the Mercator projection?

Advantage: The Mercator map projection shows the correct shapes of the continents and directions accurately. Disadvantage: The Mercator map projection does not show true distances or sizes of continents, especially near the north and south poles. Who Uses it? Sailors use a Mercator map to navigate.

Does Mercator projection preserve angle?

Mercator found that to keep the rhumb lines straight he had to make lines of latitude move away from each other as they moved north and south of the equator. In order to do this, he created a projection that preserved the 90° angles between the latitude and longitude lines.

Why do we use the Mercator projection?

Why is the Mercator projection a culturally biased projection?

Therefore, people may unconsciously place the shrunken developing countries out of geographical importance, possibly affecting how much they see these countries as being “worthy” of support. The Mercator Map projects the message of colonialist superiority and reinforces the perceived inferiority of developing nations.

What’s the most accurate map projection?

AuthaGraph
AuthaGraph. This is hands-down the most accurate map projection in existence. In fact, AuthaGraph World Map is so proportionally perfect, it magically folds it into a three-dimensional globe. Japanese architect Hajime Narukawa invented this projection in 1999 by equally dividing a spherical surface into 96 triangles.

Is UTM a Mercator projection?

UTM is the acronym for Universal Transverse Mercator, a plane coordinate grid system named for the map projection on which it is based (Transverse Mercator). The UTM system consists of 60 zones, each 6-degrees of longitude in width.

Is UTM orthographic projection?

Overlaid on the yellow layer using partial opacity is an Orthographic projection centered on the same map center shown in blue color. The numbers are positioned at the center of UTM Zones 1, 2 and 3. The Orthographic map is essentially accurate over the entire illustration.

What is geometric map projection?

A map projection is a mathematically described technique of how to represent the Earth’s curved surface on a flat map. To represent parts of the surface of the Earth on a flat paper map or on a computer screen, the curved horizontal reference surface must be mapped onto the 2D mapping plane.

Which of the following is a characteristic of the Mercator projection?

Which of the following is a characteristics of the Mercator projection? The size and shape of countries in the higher latitudes are greatly exaggerated.