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Tuesday, 8 October 2024

"Where in the world is Andrew?", updated

I posted a decade ago here re: creating dynamic maps where my travels can show on video. I have since improved on the original Mercator maps that smear out the poles and make N Hemisphere land mass look a lot bigger than it really is. 

Mercator projection (Wikipedia) started with mariners, whose maps allowed to plot sailings in straight lines. It was later kept by Colonialist Europe and Cold War North America, because it increased the size of colonizers and reduced that of the colonies, or conversely made the Soviet Union look bigger & more threatening.

So-Called Equal Earth projection (Wikipedia)  tries to rectify that, by reducing the distortion as much as possible over as much of the globe as possible. It's not unlike the famous National Geographic wall maps in another esoteric projection (Nat. Geo.). And speaking of esoteric, Spilhaus (French Wikipedia) is extreme in flattening out the Earth in order to make ocean-centric maps: see my comment at the bottom, and  my Story Map "Focus on Oceans" here.

So here are videos of my travels from 1957 to 2007 in various projections and centers. The figure below shows the location details and the legend, in order to declutter the videos themselves, and UN countries are omitted to declutter the figure in turn.

click to enlarge

Equal Earth centred on Greenwich Meridian https://youtu.be/bpP6RfEYBio

Equal Earth centred on Americas 90° W long. https://youtu.be/Njzq_huXYr8

Equal Earth centred on Dateline https://youtu.be/Njzq_huXYr8

Ocean-centric Spilhaus centred on Antarctica (N & S America @  upper & lower left, Europe & Africa top & center L, Australasia center R, Siberia top R, N American W coast bottom R) https://youtu.be/mzV_tVGt_sM

[Tip: hit the browser Refresh button to get rid of YouTube suggestions ending the videos]

Note that this projection works better on, say, ocean currents and transcontinental flights:

click to enlarge
click to enlarge
 
L: Plastics in the Oceans from Story Map: https://arcg.is/0azz0S
R: Ten Longest Haul Flights from tweet: https://bit.ly/4eLxDzs

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