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Mercator projection
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Diagram illustrating the simple cylindrical projection used in the Mercator map projection. On the left, a globe is shown with a cylinder wrapped around it, tangent at the equator, and a light source at the center projecting the map onto the cylinder. In the center, the Earth's features are projected onto the cylindrical surface. On the right, the resulting Mercator projection is displayed as a rectangular world map with latitude and longitude grid lines.
Smiling white woman pointing up at a vintage map, superimposed with the text Africa and the Mercator map.
Side-by-side comparison showing a globe of the Earth on the left with accurately proportioned continents, and a Mercator projection map on the right, where landmasses appear increasingly distorted and stretched near the poles, especially between 60 and 90 degrees latitude. The map highlights how the Mercator projection exaggerates the size of high-latitude regions. global topographic map of Venus Mercator's 1569 world map
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Mercator projection: Media

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Is the World's Most Popular Map Wrong?
The Mercator map distorts the size of some countries and continents.
Video: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Images

Mercator projection
The Mercator projection is a transformation of a cylindrical projection used for...
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Distortion caused by the Mercator projection
A globe (left) depicting Earth with no land distortion and the Mercator projection...
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
global topographic map of Venus
Global topographic map of Venus derived from laser altimetry data gathered by the...
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Mercator's 1569 world map
All the continents are shown in Mercator's 1569 world map, which used the projection...
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
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