WHY GOOGLE MAPS STILL USES THE MERCATOR

Jessica Bryce (WHS)

Used historically to make sense of the world around us for many purposes, serving political, nautical and artistic functions among others, map’s are arguably mankind’s greatest tool. However, despite huge improvements in technology and mapping abilities since the first Babylonian map 10,000 years ago, maps are still unable to present a sufficiently accurate picture in the present day. The spherical shape of the globe means that its geometry does not allow for projecting it onto a flat surface without having to sacrifice certain aspects of factual detail. This shortcoming will be discussed with regards to the popular map projection, the Mercator, which is still widely used and accepted through the increase in technology, such as the rise of Google Maps. When Google Maps was created in 2005, the Mercator actually wasn’t used in the first launch, but it was introduced shortly after. In 2009 an employee explained that it was due to Mercator’s ability to preserve angles of roads, as previously “streets in high latitude places like Stockholm did not meet at right angles on the map the way they do in reality”. This highlights one of the most important reason’s for Mercator’s popularity with mapping services such as Google Maps – its accuracy when it comes to nautical navigation. The strength of the Mercator projection is that the way in which its configured keeps lines of latitude and longitude perpendicular to one another, and preserves angles locally. This gives the user the ability to plot a course on a constant bearing in a straight line, which is the reason behind its growth in popularity during the exploration age to such an extent that it has since become the standard. The likely reason behind its continued use on Google Maps is that is has become very familiar with people, making it easy to print onto maps, in both tangible and, more recently, intangible formats. Moreover, its uses as a nautical maps has meant that when using the map to get from one place to the other, the angles of the roads relative to one another are projected onto the map in the same way in which they are laid out in real life, allowing for ease of use of Google Maps’ 2 billion daily users. However, there is a cost for the nautical accuracy of the Mercator, the distortion of its countries’ land areas. This distortion increases nearer the poles and has the effect of making countries in very high or low latitudes look bigger than they really are. This may not seem like a big price to pay for the abilities of the Mercator projection as a tool for travelling, but the impacts contribute to how many of us see the world. Take Greenland for example, the Mercator shows it to be larger than the continent of Africa, whereas in reality Africa’s area is fourteen times larger. This can be said for other countries as well, and the distortion in size is clear when comparing the Mercator projection with the Peters projection, showing different countries’ relative sizes. This shortcoming of the Mercator becomes more apparent when considering that not only does it alters the way the countries’ sizes are shown, but consequently can result in changing the way in which people see the relative importance of certain countries on a global scale, arguably contributing to why many don’t immediately see Africa as a continent when learning geography at a young age, and discount it as a global player. The Mercator can be regarded as a euro-centric view of the world in a political sense, and because of how widespread it is and has been for so long, recently due to the development and subsequent popularity of Google Maps, this euro-centricity has been another reinforcer of the outdated view of European superiority and influence over the rest of the world. A shortcoming that brings into question where or not modern mapping tools should use the Mercator projection in the way in which it has been used for so long. But even if the Mercator is no longer able to function as the ideal mapping projection, it cannot be replaced without a suitable alternative. There are multiple different map projections, less well known that the Mercator but still relevant. One of which is the Pacificcentred map which, instead of present the world from a colonial perspective, with London and therefore the rest of the EU towards the centre of the map, presents the world with the Pacific Ocean at the centre and the Atlantic at the sides. It challenges previous colonial beliefs that have resulted in many of the stereotypical map presentations, by pushing Europe to the edge and placing Asia in a more prominent position. However, this map is less accurate when trying to get from place to place, as all maps are only able to show a single story of the world. Recently the Peters projection, the map with relative size accuracy, has been introduced as the map that Boston public schools will teach their students from. This is a large step from the US towards de-colonising history, avoiding the exaggerated sizes of traditionally developed countries in Europe and North America, and although it can be argued that the distortion of countries’ shapes is a shortcoming of the map, as a teaching tool in schools where mapping from one place to another using correct angles is not typically part of the curriculum, it may have huge benefits in presenting a view of the world that does not physically diminish less developed areas and enforce the stereotype of their unimportance. On the other hand, these socio-political issues are not the main reason behind Google Maps’ choice of projection and so its significance can be questioned.

In conclusion, the Mercator is used by Google Maps because of its accuracy as a tool, helping people travel from A to B with minimal confusion. However, on a much larger scale, its presentation of the world that, whether purposeful or not, reinforces the assumption of more developed countries having superiority over those which as traditionally seen as ‘less developed’ is becoming increasingly outdated, especially in the present day where many are seeking to change these stereotypes. So, with increasing technology and the developing social climate, in the near future Google Maps may be called to present the world in a different light when looking at the mapped globe, whilst still maintaining its factual detail on a smaller scale. Bibliography

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/ archaeology/a32832512/history-of-maps/ https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=W41aZKInoK0&t=0s https://philmikejones.me/blog/2015-05-04-internetmaps-mercator/ https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/5/17653122/ google-maps-update-mercator-projection-earth-isnt-flat https://theconversation.com/five-maps-that-willchange-how-you-see-the-world-74967