A New Map of the World Was Designed

STATES CHRONICLE – Men of science have thought about developing a new map of the world. Frequently, cartographers forget about scale and focus on size, thus flattening the Earth’s surface. They design Antarctica as if it lies infinitely across Earth’s bottom and China has a similar size with that of the US, including both Hawaii and Alaska. Nevertheless, specialists working to develop AuthaGraph have decided to develop a more realistic map of the world.

They tried to preserve the curved reality of our planet by angling the continents. Hajime Narukawa, who is a professor at Keio University’s Graduate School of Media and Governance in Tokio, has produced AuthaGraph to display a more accurate representation of the distances between the continents and their size.

The map finally shows the correct distance between Alaska and Russia and it also represents Antarctica exhibiting its entire territory. The new map of the world received the grand award in Japan’s Good Design Award. This project has surpassed a thousand other presentations in the competition that took place last month.

The website of AuthaGraph has exhibited a lot of 3D models that can be developed from the map. Being a depiction of the globe, it can be folded into cones and spheres to develop a better understanding of the distances between countries and continents, but also displaying the real surfaces and shapes of different locations.

The website published a larger model of the map which consists of forty copies that are linked to them, making possible real measurements between one geographic space to another. This is a highly innovative idea, helping anyone use some special scales bound to establish the correct distances.

In the past, we experienced a lot of problems when it came to world maps, regarding the distorted sizes of the territories and the unreal distances between them. Any land mass which was placed toward the poles was displayed to be bigger than it was. The new invention will no longer raise such problems, making us aware of the loads of facts we weren’t aware of.

It is pretty difficult for cartographers to design a 2D map, knowing that they need to precisely measure the way they unfold the sphere to not provide wrong information about distances and surfaces. Now, we can forget about the Mercator Projection and use the AuthaGraph.

Image source: wikipedia