Look at almost any classroom wall map and you will see Greenland sprawling across the top, roughly as big as Africa. In reality Africa is about fourteen times larger. That distortion comes from the Mercator projection, and for the first time in a long while it has a serious, good-looking rival: the Equal Earth projection.
The Problem Equal Earth Was Built to Solve
Mercator, designed in 1569 for navigation, keeps compass directions straight — a genuinely useful property for sailors and, today, for web maps. The price is area. The further you get from the equator, the more the map inflates landmasses. Greenland, Canada, Russia, and Scandinavia all balloon, while equatorial regions look smaller than they really are. Africa, which could comfortably swallow China, India, the United States, and most of Europe at once, ends up looking like a modest peninsula hanging beneath Europe.
Equal-area projections have always existed to fix this, but most of them looked awkward — countries smeared sideways or squeezed into pointed ovals. Mapmakers were left choosing between a map that lied about size and a map that was correct but ugly. Few people want an ugly map on the wall, so Mercator kept winning by default.
Where Equal Earth Came From
Equal Earth was created in 2018 by Bojan Savric, Tom Patterson, and Bernhard Jenny. The motivation was practical. A year earlier, some schools had begun adopting the Gall-Peters projection specifically because it shows true relative sizes — but Gall-Peters stretches the world into tall, distorted shapes that many people find unpleasant to read. The trio set out to build an equal-area map that people would actually want to use, taking visual cues from the well-loved Robinson projection while fixing its area errors.
How It Works
Equal Earth is a pseudocylindrical, equal-area projection. Every country appears at its true size relative to every other, so Africa finally looks like the giant it is and Greenland shrinks down to its honest proportions. The meridians curve gently inward toward the poles, giving the map a rounded, globe-like feel rather than a rigid rectangle. The trade-off, as with any flat map, is shape: landmasses near the far left and right edges stretch a little. But areas stay true, which is the entire point.
It's Not the Only Option — Here's the Family
It helps to know what Equal Earth is competing with, because projections fall into a few broad families and each makes a different promise:
- Conformal (shape-preserving): Mercator is the famous example. Great for local angles and navigation, terrible for comparing sizes.
- Equal-area (size-preserving): Gall-Peters, Mollweide, and now Equal Earth. Sizes are honest, shapes bend.
- Compromise (a bit of everything): Robinson and Winkel Tripel — the latter is what National Geographic uses for its reference world maps. Nothing is exactly right, but nothing is badly wrong either.
Maps Have Always Been a Little Political
The projection debate is never purely technical. Which places look big, central, and important is a choice, and people have noticed for a long time. In the 1970s the historian Arno Peters loudly promoted the Gall-Peters projection as a fairer view that stopped shrinking the developing world, and the argument flared up again in 2017 when Boston's public schools switched their classroom maps to it. Much of the pushback was about looks rather than principle — Gall-Peters is correct on area but unpleasant to read. Equal Earth lands neatly in that gap: it makes the same fairness point about size while still looking like a map you would happily hang on a wall.
Why It's Catching On
Equal Earth is free to use and was released openly, which helped it spread fast. NASA's Earth Observatory adopted it for global maps, and it has turned up in news graphics and scientific publications where size genuinely matters — climate data, population density, or land cover, where an inflated Arctic would badly mislead the reader. When the whole point of a map is to compare how much of something is where, an equal-area projection is not a stylistic choice; it is a correctness requirement.
Mercator Isn't Going Anywhere (And That's Fine)
None of this means Mercator is doomed. The version that powers Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, called Web Mercator, sticks around because it preserves local angles and divides neatly into square tiles that are easy to zoom and pan. When you are navigating a city street, shape matters more than continental area. Different jobs call for different maps.
That is the real lesson of Equal Earth: there is no single perfect map of a round planet on a flat page. Every projection trades something away, and a good map-reader knows which trade they are looking at. A satellite-guessing game is a surprisingly good way to train your eye on what countries really look like, edges and all. Try a few rounds of EarthGuessr and see how well your mental map holds up.