Year 2022 face_with_colon_three
It might seem that the world’s landmasses are fixed, but as Richard Fisher discovers, there are major changes coming.
Nearly 500 years ago, the Flemish cartographer Geradus Mercator produced one of the world’s most important maps.
It certainly wasn’t the first attempt at a world atlas, and it was not particularly accurate either: Australia is absent, and the Americas are only roughly drawn. Since then, cartographers have produced ever-more precise versions of this continental arrangement, correcting for Mercator’s errors, as well the biases between hemispheres and latitudes created by his projection. But Mercator’s map, along with others produced by his 16th-Century contemporaries, revealed a truly global picture of Earth’s landmasses – a perspective that has persisted in people’s minds ever since.
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