Farewell to Mercator?

On 4 September 2026, the UN General Assembly voted 164 to 1 in favour of the ‘Correct the Map’ resolution. Six states – Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine – abstained. The resolution recommends that governments, schools, the media and technology companies use area-preserving projections such as Equal Earth for size comparisons in future, rather than the projection developed in 1569 by the Duisburg geographer Gerhard Mercator. This projection continues to dominate most digital maps to this day. The recommendation is not binding. The Mercator projection remains permitted.

Togo tabled the resolution on behalf of the African Union. The reasoning is geometrically sound: the Mercator projection enlarges areas the further they are from the equator. Africa, which lies largely near the equator, thus appears smaller than Greenland, even though, according to the French Foreign Ministry, it is almost fourteen times as large.

The US was the only country to vote against it. Its UN delegation described the resolution as a “radical ideological project” and accused the General Assembly of distracting itself from its core responsibilities. There is no statement from US President Donald Trump on the resolution itself. Nevertheless, geography professors Jack Swab and Derek Alderman from the University of Tennessee see a link to his policy on Greenland: Trump’s repeated claim that the island is “massive” in size, whilst calling for its annexation by the US, is likely influenced by the distortion of the Mercator projection, they write in an analysis for The Conversation. On Mercator maps, Greenland appears greatly enlarged due to its proximity to the Pole – almost as large as the entire African continent, which is in reality fourteen times larger.

Why we’re sticking with Google Maps anyway

For our travel atlas – the interactive world map featuring around 280 destinations from Tellerrandstories – this resolution could, at first glance, have had consequences. But that hasn’t been the case: our map continues to run on Google Maps – and Google Maps still uses the Mercator projection.

The reason lies in the technology, not in editorial decisions. Interactive map services such as Google Maps load the world in square tiles, which are reloaded as you zoom in. This method, which has been the industry standard for a decade and a half, only works with an angle-preserving projection – that is, one that accurately preserves shapes and directions, regardless of scale. This is precisely what the Mercator projection achieves. It was developed in 1569 for navigation, because a course that appears as a straight line on the map corresponds to a constant compass bearing at sea.

Area-preserving projections such as Equal Earth cannot do this. They show continents in their correct proportions, but in doing so distort shapes and angles – to varying degrees, depending on their position on the map. That is why no interactive map service currently offers an area-preserving alternative, not even providers that rely on OpenStreetMap or other tile servers. We have tried to make the area-preserving projection interactive. However, the plotted points are difficult to hit because you cannot zoom into the Equal Earth projection.

The real problem: no map can do everything at once

The debate about the Mercator projection distracts from a more fundamental problem, one that even Equal Earth does not solve: a spherical surface cannot be transferred onto a plane without distortion. Carl Friedrich Gauss proved this in the 19th century with his Theorema Egregium. Every projection must sacrifice one property: area or angular fidelity. No map can represent both accurately at the same time.

The extent to which this compromise is visible is particularly evident at the poles. In the Mercator projection, the distortion increases to immeasurable levels towards the poles; the North Pole lies mathematically at infinity and remains representable. In the Equal Earth projection, which we use for our static travel atlas, the same point appears as a short line – visible evidence that whilst the projection accurately reproduces areas, it stretches shapes near the poles.

For readers, this means there is no ‘correct’ world map, only maps serving different purposes. Mercator remains useful for navigation, a fact even recognised by the UN resolution. Equal Earth is better suited for comparing the sizes of continents. For interactive maps with a zoom function, Mercator remains the only technical option for the time being, as long as there is no area-preserving map engine with comparable zoom capability.