Maps: Bigger is Not Better

JOSEPH NEY-JUN
Staff Writer

How well do we know our Earth? Could we accurately map it out if someone gave us a pen and paper on the spot? In 2012, Zak Ziebell, a student at the University of Michigan, sought to answer this question. He approached 30 random people and asked them to draw a map of the world.

When Ziebell merged the results into one picture layered over each other, the results were interesting. The U.S. was fully formed, except for Florida, Alaska and Hawaii, which were left out. However, the other continents were horribly misshapen. Cuba? The Dominican Republic? New Zealand? All left out. Some areas were completely merged with one another; for example, Mexico and Africa were completely blended into their neighboring continents.

It is fun to look and laugh at how poorly these people did, but how many of us can boast that we know the world from memory? This is not necessarily our fault, but more the result of being misinformed for our whole lives.

A perfect illustration is extremely difficult to create. A globe is the closest one can get to viewing the world in its true proportions. One cannot simply take the surface of a globe and flatten it onto a student’s textbook. It is like taking a perfect orange peel and flattening it without cracking the skin.

Every country will draw themselves as being larger than they actually are because it makes their people feel big and important psychologically. Not that they are unimportant, but the worth of a country should not be based off how much many inches they take up in a student’s textbook.

A new rectangular map needs to be drawn with equal-area projection in mind. This is the most accurate map that is possible without using a sphere. It will set a scale and depict the size of all land masses accurately to each other and allow for geography to be taught better in schools. Any politics or other reason should be set aside to show the world as it is. It should not center on one country and show that country as being larger than in reality. It is important that we remember how big the rest of the world is—or how small we are—and that we all have a place in it.