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THE ONE-MINUTE GEOGRAPHER | GREENLAND
Greenland Calling: Beware of Map Projections. Be Aware of Them.
What kind of map will we be looking at when someone thinks about “buying Greenland”?
The One-Minute Geographer uses a lot of maps! So it’s worth a post to talk a bit about the distortions that are inherent in any flat map. Only a globe can correctly portray size, shape, distance and direction correctly all at once. Any flat map — every flat map distorts one or more of those aspects of the globe. Since Greenland is in the news lately, we’ll use that as a good example. (Greenland, the 51st state! Or wait — maybe that’s Canada??? LOL.)
Why can’t a flat map accurately portray size, shape, distance and direction?
Imagine that you have a globe, and you want to make a flat map from it. So you peel off the paper map covering the globe and press it flat. Scrunch, crush, wrinkles, tears. What a mess! On small areas you can get away with flattening without noticeable distortion. Take a razor and cut out tiny Rhode Island from the globe and press it between the pages of a book. You probably would not notice that it got scrunched just a bit. Let’s tale a look at Greenland on the Mercator world map projection below to illustrate the distortion.
