The history of world maps is fascinating and transformative. The world map has changed a lot throughout history from the early days of Ptolemy in Egypt to the emergence of modern world maps at the end of the 18th century. But do we actually use the right map these days? Is it the most accurate map? Perhaps in the future, a new world map will take over the old map and be the consensus on the political shape of our planet.
As a matter of fact, one of the reasons that Europe is in the middle of the modern world map is because this map was first created in Europe by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507. The map you’re familiar with, that pretty much everyone is familiar with this map, is called the Mercator Projection, which was first created by cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569.
We cannot argue that the Mercator Projection is a great map, but this world map used by anyone has some major flaws. For example, it distorts the size of landmasses, particularly in the northern and southern poles. The best example to emphasize this problem is Greenland, the world’s largest island, which seems huge on the Mercator map, but actually, if you place Greenland in other positions on the map, you can see how the Mercator world mao does not represent the size of landmasses accurately.
Nevertheless, humans must evolve and improve. There were many attempts since the 18th century to create a more accurate world map including the Mollweide projection, the Goode Homolosine Projection, the Gall-Peters projection, the Boggs eumorphic projection, and the Authagraph World Map.
The Authagraph world map – The most accurate world map
The Authagraph world map was created by Hajime Narukawa, a Japanese architect, and is considered by many the most revolutionary and accurate world map as of 2020. Below is a short video that explains everything about this unique world map:
What makes this map so special? The AuthaGraph map divides the globe into 96 regions and transfers them to a tetrahedron shape. This world map can be tiled in any direction without visible seams, and with the Authagraph map, you can choose various regions at its center, which eventually creates a much more proportionally accurate world map.