The black masses map4/11/2023 ![]() Geographical historians consider this to be the first true map of the Arctic. So instead of including it in the overall projection, Mercator decided to set a small, top-down view of the Arctic in the bottom left corner of his world map. Under the terms of this Mercator math, the North Pole would appear so large as to be almost infinite. (This is also why so many people think Africa is the same size as Greenland, when it is really about 14 times bigger-the Mercator projection is still very common in schools.) Mercator’s 1569 map of the world, the first to feature his famous projection. In order to make his map useful for navigation, though, Mercator had to sacrifice accuracy in other areas-specifically, he had to stretch out the top and bottom parts of his map, making the lands and seas in the far North and South appear disproportionately larger than those nearer the equator. In 1569, Mercator came out with a map of the world based on this principal, which stretched from East to West and promised, in his words, “no trace… of any of those errors which must necessarily be encountered on the ordinary charts of shipmasters.” The Mercator projection was invented for sailors, who, thanks to its design, could use it to plot a straight-line course from their point of origin to their destination. The map’s creator, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, is best known for the “Mercator projection,” the now-famed method of taking the curved lines of the Earth and transforming them into straight ones that can be used on a flat map. Such was the case with the first known map of the Arctic: the Septentrionalium Terrarum, which is filled with magnetic stones, strange whirlpools, and other colorful guesses. And, if they didn’t know, they pretty much made it up. Centuries ago, though, when people tried to map the Arctic, they weren’t too concerned with what was happening to it-they just wanted to know what the heck was up there. As winter sea ice shrinks and cracks appear, they try to understand the reasons for these changes, and determine what we should expect in the future. These days, climate scientists are looking hard at Arctic maps.
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