Interactive Comparison of Map Projections (opens in new tab)

(bl.ocks.org)

54 pointspeey5y ago11 comments

11 comments

glup5y ago

This is super neat, but it is missing my favorite projection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transverse_Mercator_projection. To think that Mercator has the same error profile as Transverse Mercator, but we generally accept the former because of ubiquity, is very disturbing to me.

schemescape5y ago

Why does Greenland disappear for some of the projections?

sloucher5y ago

Also the UK is missing from the Mercator projection.

tantalor5y ago

And Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Cuba, Madagascar.

I think the bug is related to islands!

tetris115y ago

Weirdly these missing islands persist into the lower projections, unless you first select a higher projection on the list and then proceed with the lower ones (skipping Mercator)

globular-toast5y ago

It's actually just the Mercator projection that is broken for some reason. Lots of things are missing.

supernova87a5y ago

"Denmark opted out of paying the mapping API license fee to Miller Cylindrical LLC, and so Greenland has been omitted from the data product for your convenience."

ytechie5y ago

I've heard that all map projections are a compromise. Is this a leftover of printed maps?

If you take a photo of the earth, you can't argue that it's inaccurate, as it's literally a photo. When you use something like Google Earth, it's the same deal. You can rotate the map and everything is rendered fairly accurately for any given perspective. Aren't they an accurate representation?

batmanthehorse5y ago

It's a fact of projecting the surface of a sphere onto a 2D plane. You can't see every side of the earth at once in Google Earth. Even the globe you look at in Google Earth is distorted since it's still a 3D projection into 2D. Looking at it from the equator, countries at the equator will appear larger relative to countries near the poles.

Anyway! This site is really cool. I think 'Natural Earth' is most satisfying to me subjectively. Looks close enough to what we're all raised with, and seems to have a good balance of various types of distortion.

joebergeron5y ago

Try peeling an orange with as few tears as possible, and flattening the skin against a hard surface.

nausher815y ago

Interesting visualization.

There was also another page on the web which showed the various distortions on the maps themselves. While I can't find that, there is also this slightly deeper dive into projections - https://kartoweb.itc.nl/geometrics/Map%20projections/body.ht... And for a more humorous take, this XKCD gem - https://xkcd.com/977/

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse