People are confused with navigation
Published on June 4th, 2024
The X account for Latest in Space offered the fun fact for how it was possible to sail from India to the USA in a completely straight line, without touching a single piece of land. The statement, accompanied with a diagram of a very curved line bending below Africa and South America, brought confusion which the IFLScience website seeks to clarify:
Representing a 3D world on a 2D map is always going to end up with some issues and some compromises. No matter how accurate you try to make it, you will end up with stretched areas, squashed countries, or else parts of the map cut out altogether.
The map you are likely familiar with is one based on the Mercator projection, published by cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It’s a cylindrical map projection, in which you place the globe into a cylinder and then project each point of the map onto a corresponding point on the cylinder.
Meridians (imaginary vertical lines going through the Earth from the North to the South Pole) are mapped onto vertical lines equally spaced apart on the map, and circles of latitude (imaginary horizontal lines from east to west) are mapped onto equally spaced horizontal lines. – Full report