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Maps of small regions accurately show places, distances, and directions, but for larger regions, different mapping techniques are needed. The Mercator map shows compass directions as straight lines and is useful for navigation. A cylinder can be cut and rolled flat to create a map, but it distorts distances and areas. Mercator maps are useful for areas near the equator but not for regions beyond the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. They remain popular for online map software.
Maps of relatively small regions of the Earth such as a state or province accurately show places, distances, and directions. For larger regions of the Earth such as a hemisphere or, for the entire Earth, a map cannot accurately show all distances and directions because the Earth is round, whereas maps are flat. Depending on the intended use of the map, different mapping techniques have been invented to realistically show some aspects such as distances at the expense of other aspects such as direction or the relative size of land masses and bodies of water. A Mercator map is a technique in which compass directions are shown as straight lines. It helped sailors map out routes to distant places and became the standard for world navigation.
A cylinder can be cut and rolled flat on the flat surface of a map. Because of this property, people have come up with different globe-to-cylinder mappings over the last few centuries. In one simple mapping method, you wrap a sheet of clear paper into a cylinder around the equator of a globe. Then, keeping the North Pole of the globe facing up, you can view all points on the globe horizontally and mark them on the map.
In this mapping, longitudes are represented as equally spaced vertical lines and latitudes as horizontal lines. East-West distances are accurate at the equator, but expand everywhere. For example, Greenland looks enormously large. In fact, the North and South poles are stretched across the entire length of the map even though they are actually simple points. This is true for all cylindrical mappings where the cylinder connects to the equator of the globe.
In the mapping described above, north-south distances are accurately represented. Since east-west distances vary from the equator to the poles while north-south distances do not, such a map creates difficulties when traveling to distant places because the path to be taken is not always shown as a straight line. In 1569, the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator invented the Mercator map in which the courses of a given compass direction were shown as straight lines. The Mercator map has been considered a significant invention as it came at a time when navigation and nautical navigation were gaining prominence.
Mercator extended north-south distances to correspond to east-west at a given latitude. This made the distances, and therefore the scale, the same in all directions around any point. However, areas far from the equator, such as Greenland, looked huge because they were very wide and very tall. Despite this, Mercator’s method of mapping was very useful to sailors.
A Mercator map is useful for representing regions from the equator to the area around the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. Beyond that, the distortion in distances and areas is extremely large. Nowadays, planes are capable of following the shortest routes around the world; however, such routes do not use constant compass directions, but instead constantly curved paths called “great circles”. However, a Mercator map is very popular for showing areas and countries near the equator. Mercator maps are often used by established online map software as the calculations for zooming in and out can be done quickly.
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