What if I told you that the standard world maps you have been seeing in atlases all your life are inaccurate? In fact, public schools in Boston recently switched to a more accurate map
Europe is smaller
For almost 500 years, the Mercator projection has been one of the most popular maps of the world. It was devised by Gerardus Mercator, a renowned cartographer in 1569. So what exactly is wrong with it?
Mercator, who devised the map to aid navigations for colonial trade routes, exaggerated the size of the entire northern hemisphere, according to the Guardian. As a result, the sizes of continents as well as nations became distorted
For
example
South America was made to look about the same size as Europe, when in fact it is almost twice as large, and Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller
Imperialist twist
The new map introduced in the Boston public school syllabus is known as the Gall-Peters projection. The German historian Arno Peters published his projection in 1974 and it matches work by a 19th-century Scottish mapmaker, James Gall, the Guardian added. The map rewrote the sociopolitical message of the Mercator map which exaggerated the size of the imperialist powers