Optical Illusions in Mapping

I am sure everyone is avidly following the interactive map tracking. I know that the team do find it strange that we all know exactly where they are (it's not paranoia - you are being watched). They have made magnificent progress so far and zooming out on the map would indicate that they are about half way there.

Unfortunately it doesn't quite work like that. The Google maps system shows a map that is familiar to us all - this is known as the Mercator Projection. It is one way of solving the problem of how to take a spherical object and show it on a flat screen or sheet of paper.

A feature of the Mercator Projection is that it does alter the relative proportions of countries as you move away from the Equator. The Northern European countries are shown to be artificially larger when compared to similar sized countries near the Equator.

Mercator Projection

As an example we can use the UK, France and the Sudan, the largest country in Africa. The UK has an area of 94,060sqm, France is 260,550sqm and the Sudan is a whopping 967,495sqm. You would never have guessed this from looking at the interactive map.

There have been attempts to produce different projections to address this issue. A quick dive into Google will show that this can be quite a contentious subject. I have used two of the other such projections to give a better illustration of how much distance they still have to travel to get through Africa.

The first is the Peters Projection which you can see has stretched Africa significantly. The second is the Behrmann Equal Areas projection. it has a similar effect on the view.

Peters Projection

Behrmann Equal Areas Projection

Based on these projections and Mac's schedule they are in fact about one third of the way there rather than half. This is far from a done deal. A consequence of the Mercator Projection map used is that their progress hour by hour will seem to slow. This has to be combined with the fact that will be in Africa and it may not just be an optical illusion.

Steve Holland UK Ops

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