They really have nothing else to worry about, do they? What a useless bunch of pricks...
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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The projection they went with is the Equal Earth. See a few comments below me for the projection itself.
A good choice, but tbh I feel the modified Dymaxion map would've been the best choice if only displaying land; or the Waterman butterfly.
If also water, then Tobler hyperelliptical., or Aitoff.
See here for a full list of map projections. I also like the Hao projection on there, but yeah.
I'm just grateful they didn't go with the Gall-Peters, which often seems to be the favorite alternative, but always feels to me like it distorts almost every country.
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Rare US-Israel disagreement
Maybe Trump-Netanyahu were not voting here this time
I feel like these projections make Antartica looks significantly larger than it reality. Is this thought correct?
I mean, do not underestimate the size of Antarctica. It has the area of about two Australias (14.2 vs. 7.6 Mio. km²), and it's only somewhat smaller than South America (17.8 Mio. km²).
It does always look a bit larger as well, though, simply because it is unrolled at the bottom there.
(We're not gonna talk about Mercator, where it does look comically big...)
For the proper size, you'll have to look at a globe.
Wikipedia has little preview globes:
- Antarctica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctica
- Australia for comparison: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia
This webpage is also not too terrible for a 3D globe: https://www.webglearth.com/
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Does it say which projection they're actually going to use?
According to this Guardian article:
the UN general assembly officially retired the 16th-century Mercator projection in favour of one based on the more accurate 2018 Equal Earth design
UN resolutions are non-enforceable, so I'm sure countries will implement it in different ways (some may not implement it at all). France has already said they will be using Eckert IV which is close to Equal Earth:
Eckert and Equal Earth are fine, but I much prefer Peirce Quincuncial as more representative of the globe. All of the land distortion is minimal and equal, and it's tileable to get a better image of distance across hemispheres
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Waterman butterfly