快猫短视频

A new kind of world map (above) has been developed that shows the true size of the continents without distorting their shapes too much.

The world map you are probably familiar with is called the Mercator projection (below), which was developed all the way back in 1569 and greatly distorts the relative areas of land masses. It makes Africa look tiny, and Greenland and Russia appear huge.

There have been , but there are issues with all of them. For instance, the Robinson projection (final image), with its curved sides, is much better than the Mercator but still does not show areas accurately.

that accurately show the relative areas of continents but greatly distort their shapes (below). The controversy this provoked among cartographers spurred Californian software engineer Bojan Savric and others to create the .

It looks similar to the Robinson but accurately shows relative areas. Looked at in isolation, it may not appear much different to the Mercator, apart from the curved sides. But side by side the dramatic differences in the relative sizes of the land masses are obvious.

People who work with maps . 鈥淸It] nicely balances several competing criteria, including aesthetics,鈥� .

鈥淚t鈥檚 astonishing to me that we are still designing new global map projections,鈥� , head of NASA鈥檚 Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which maintains one of the main records of global surface temperatures. 聽NASA has already started using it, to .