Boston school children said goodbye to the traditional world map that’s hung in classrooms for centuries, and welcomed a map that is much more geographically correct. The Mercator Projection map (created at the late 1500s became the most widely used map as easily allowed for sailors to navigate the globe). The surface of a sphere can’t be represented as a plain, the map is grossly misrepresentative of the earth. The map is seen as being super-Euro centric with Germany at the center (despite Germany being much farther north). Differences in size too. Africa and Greenland appearing to be about the same size, but in actuality Greenland is 14 times smaller.
The new map, Gall-Peters Projection, is currently looked at as the more accurate map with organizations like the United Nations and aid agencies.
“[It was] interesting to watch the students saying ‘Wow’ and ‘No, really? Look at Africa, it’s bigger’,” Natacha Scott, director of history and social studies at Boston Public Schools, told The Guardian. “Some of their reactions were quite funny, but it was also amazingly interesting to see them questioning what they thought they knew.”
The map will show the true size of the earth’s Southern Hemisphere, which is around 100 million square km (38.6 million square miles) – roughly twice the size of the Northern hemisphere, at 49 million square km (18.9 million square miles).
You may remember hearing about this map thanks to Alison Janney in The West Wing: