Re:Orient Earth

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Field notes · Cartography & power

This is Earth, with the habit removed.

Re:Orient Earth is the world at true size, turned so south sits on top. Nothing here has been resized or corrected — the only thing taken away is a four-hundred-year-old convention. This is the story of why that’s worth doing.

IStart at the classroom wall

The world map you memorized as a kid — the one from the classroom wall, the news graphics, the shower curtain — is almost certainly the Mercator projection. Gerardus Mercator published it in 1569 as a tool for sailors: on his map, a compass bearing plots as a straight line, which is a beautiful thing if you are navigating an ocean.¹ It was never meant to tell you how big anything is. And it doesn’t.

IIWhat the projection does

You cannot flatten a sphere without lying about something — that’s mathematics, not opinion.² Mercator’s particular lie is size: to keep those compass bearings straight, it stretches the world more and more as you move away from the equator. Land near the poles balloons. Land near the equator — most of Africa, South America, South and Southeast Asia — shrinks in comparison. The distortion is not subtle:

Africa vs. Greenland 30.4M km² vs. 2.2M km² Mercator draws them roughly equal. Africa is about fourteen times larger.⁸

South America vs. Europe 17.8M km² vs. 10.2M km² Mercator draws Europe larger. South America is nearly double its size.

Mexico vs. Alaska 1.96M km² vs. 1.72M km² Mercator draws Alaska three times the size of Mexico. Mexico is bigger.

IIISize becomes importance

Why does a sailor’s chart matter? Because it stopped being a sailor’s chart. It became the picture of the world — one of the first a child is handed, hanging on the wall for years. When one projection quietly enlarges the wealthy, historically colonizing north and shrinks the equatorial south, apparent importance follows apparent size. Generations absorb a world where Europe looms and Africa is manageable — a geography of significance that has nothing to do with the actual planet. Professional cartographers have been objecting for decades: in 1989, seven North American geographic societies formally urged an end to rectangular world maps altogether.³

Nor is this a fringe concern. In 2017, Boston Public Schools became the first U.S. district to replace classroom Mercator maps with the equal-area Gall–Peters projection⁷ — the very swap a fictional band of cartographers pitched to the White House on The West Wing sixteen years earlier.¹²

IVThen there’s “up”

Fixing size still leaves the quieter convention: north on top. That isn’t physics — in space there is no up, and mapmakers have pointed every direction at the sky. Medieval European maps put east on top, facing Eden; it’s why we still say orient yourself. Al-Idrisi’s great world map of 1154 put south on top, as much of the Islamic cartographic tradition did. North won later, riding European navigation, empire, and the printing press.⁶

And up carries weight. Psychologists have measured it: people are faster to link “up” with good and “down” with bad.⁴ The language agrees — on top of the world, upper class, high society, moving up. Keep one hemisphere on top of every map for four centuries and the arrangement starts to feel like a fact about the world instead of a choice made by the people drawing it. In 1979, Australian student Stuart McArthur published his Universal Corrective Map — south-up, Australia proudly centered — precisely to make that choice visible again.⁹

VThe honest map is round

Which brings you back to the thing spinning behind this panel. A globe is the only map with no projection at all. On this sphere, Africa is exactly as large as Africa is. The imagery is NASA’s Blue Marble — the real planet, photographed from orbit¹⁰ — and the only edit is the flip. If it looks wrong, that feeling is the point: it’s four hundred years of convention, noticing itself.

VIAnd when you need it flat

Sometimes you need a wall map. Then the honest move is an equal-area projection — one that keeps every country at its true relative size and admits what it distorts instead of hiding it. The famous equal-area answer, Gall–Peters, wins the size argument but loses the beauty one: it stretches the tropics so badly that cartographer Arthur Robinson compared it to “wet, ragged long winter underwear hung out to dry.”¹³

So this project uses the projection cartographers built to fix that. Equal Earth, published in 2018, keeps every area exactly true while letting the continents hold their shape and the poles curve instead of smearing.¹⁴ Below it is drawn south up, on a hand-shaded relief base with every border drawn — both from the public-domain Natural Earth project.¹¹

The world at true relative size — Equal Earth projection, south up. Every country keeps its real area; no landmass is inflated.

VIISources & further reading

Mark Monmonier, Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection. University of Chicago Press, 2004.
John P. Snyder, Map Projections: A Working Manual. U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1395, 1987. USGS, full text.
Committee on Map Projections, American Cartographic Association, “Geographers and Cartographers Urge End to Popular Use of Rectangular Maps.” The American Cartographer 16(3), 1989.
Brian P. Meier & Michael D. Robinson, “Why the Sunny Side Is Up: Associations Between Affect and Vertical Position.” Psychological Science 15(4), 2004. DOI.
Jeremy W. Crampton, “Cartography’s Defining Moment: The Peters Projection Controversy, 1974–1990.” Cartographica 31(4), 1994.
J.B. Harley & David Woodward (eds.), The History of Cartography, Vols. 1–2. University of Chicago Press, 1987–1992 — east-up mappae mundi; al-Idrisi’s south-up world map of 1154. Free online edition.
WBUR News, “Arriving at Boston Public Schools: More Accurate — and Inclusive — World Maps,” March 16, 2017. WBUR.
Land areas from the United Nations Statistics Division, cross-checked against the CIA World Factbook.
Stuart McArthur, McArthur’s Universal Corrective Map of the World. Melbourne, 1979.
NASA Visible Earth: Blue Marble Next Generation (Stöckli, Vermote, Saleous, Simmon & Herring, 2005) and Earth at Night, Suomi NPP VIIRS, 2012. Public domain. NASA.
Country boundaries, capitals, and the flat map’s cross-blended hypsometric relief base (by Tom Patterson): Natural Earth, public domain. naturalearthdata.com.
The West Wing, “Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail” (Season 2, Episode 16), NBC, 2001 — the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality.
Arthur H. Robinson, “Arno Peters and His New Cartography.” The American Cartographer 12(2), 1985.
Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson & Bernhard Jenny, “The Equal Earth Map Projection.” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 33(3), 2019. DOI.

Re:Orient Earth — a small argument for seeing the planet as it is. Built with NASA imagery, Natural Earth data, and a borrowed idea from a fictional pressure group.

Acquiring Earth

Re:Orient Earth

The world, flat but honest.

Equal Earth 2018

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