What does the Mercator map show accurately?
It became the standard map projection for navigation because it is unique in representing north as up and south as down everywhere while preserving local directions and shapes. As a side effect, the Mercator projection inflates the size of objects away from the equator.
What is a flat world map called?
Mercator. It’s a flat, flat world! In the 16th century, Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer devised a new way of depicting the world on a flat plane.
What is the importance of Mercator’s projection?
This projection is widely used for navigation charts, because any straight line on a Mercator projection map is a line of constant true bearing that enables a navigator to plot a straight-line course.
How did Mercator’s map help navigators?
This map, with its Mercator projection, was designed to help sailors navigate around the globe. They could use latitude and longitude lines to plot a straight route. Mercator’s projection laid out the globe as a flattened version of a cylinder. All the latitude and longitude lines intersected at 90-degree angles.
How do you pronounce Mercator?
Break ‘Mercator’ down into sounds: [MUH] + [KAY] + [TUH] – say it out loud and exaggerate the sounds until you can consistently produce them.
What does a Mercator map accurately show?
A Mercator map is a technique where compass directions are shown as straight lines. It helped sailors map routes to distant places and became the standard for world navigation. A Mercator map translates the globe onto a flat map.
What is a Mercator map best used as?
The Mercator projection was mainly used for maps. This made it possible for the entire globe to be drawn on a flat sheet. It is also used for marine navigation since the lines of constant direction appear as straight lines on the map.
What is one problem with a Mercator map?
The distorted sizes are not only a problem because they give a mistaken idea of what the world looks like. Mercator also increases the size, and arguably the perceived importance, of white nations in comparison to non-white nations. Mercator maps are also commonly cropped in an uneven way that adds even more prominence to Europe and North America.
What are Mercator maps useful for mapping?
The Mercator map has always been inadequate as a world map due to its rectangular grid and shape, but geographically illiterate publishers once found it useful for designing wall, atlas, and book maps , even maps found in newspapers published by non-geographers. It became the standard map projection for most applications and is still cemented as the mental map of most westerners today.