Mercator projection: Africa is 14 times Greenland’s size
Togo and the African Union have persuaded the UN to stop treating a map drawn in 1569 for sailors as the world’s default. The debate looks symbolic. It rests on an unavoidable geometric constraint, and on the peculiar power of an assembly where every country votes but no one is obliged to comply.
The fact
The United Nations General Assembly adopted on September 4, by 164 votes to one, a resolution brought by Togo and backed by the African Union: stop treating Mercator as the default map in favour of equal-area maps, chief among them the Equal Earth projection published in 2018. The text does not ban Mercator: it asks schools, governments, international organisations and digital map providers to change their default picture of the world wherever the size of continents matters.
Why it matters
No flat map can show a sphere without distorting something. Gerardus Mercator made his choice in 1569: his projection preserves angles, so a constant compass bearing draws as a straight line. That was the navigation tool his century needed, and the resolution leaves that use intact. The bill comes due on area, and it rises fast: surfaces double around 45 degrees of latitude, quadruple around 60, and are multiplied by ten and a half around 72 degrees, the latitude of central Greenland.
Hence the picture almost everyone carries: a Greenland as imposing as Africa. Real surfaces say otherwise. Africa covers 30.4 million square kilometres, Greenland 2.17 million, a ratio of fourteen to one.
The stake is not cartographic, it is institutional. A General Assembly resolution binds no one: every state holds one vote, the 54 African countries account for 28% of the 193 members, and the text carries no legal force. Its only lever is the norm, meaning what school atlases, UN agencies and online mapping services will keep as their default. For a continent negotiating investment, seats and quotas, perceived size is not an aesthetic detail: it is the backdrop to every conversation.
To understand why a resolution passed by 193 states can impose nothing at all, read the Fundamental: “International institutions: who really sets the rules.”
You’ll learn what separates the General Assembly from the Security Council, why five countries hold a veto inherited from 1945, and how funding an organisation becomes a lever as effective as a vote.
Read the Fundamental →
