What are the pros and cons of Mercator projection?

What are the pros and cons of Mercator projection?

Mercator

• Pros: Sailors loved it; preserves angles and directions in a small area.
• Cons: Bad for understanding the real size and shape of continents and countries.
• Related: After this video you’ll never trust a map again.
• Pros: The only ‘area-correct’ map of its time; got featured in The West Wing (S2E16)

What are the disadvantages of a Mercator projection?

Disadvantages: Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite. So, for example, Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger relative to land masses near the equator than they actually are.

What is one advantage of a Mercator projection?

One advantage of using the Mercator projection is that there are parallels and meridians to cross one another at right angles, just as they do on the globe. As a result, the direction is true everywhere on his map, a very important fact for anyone traveling east to west, or vice versa, on the Atlantic.

What map projection is most accurate?

A globe of the Earth would have an error score of 0.0. We found that the best previously known flat map projection for the globe is the Winkel tripel used by the National Geographic Society, with an error score of 4.563.

What map projection has the least distortion?

globe

What are the four types of distortion with map projections?

There are four main types of distortion that come from map projections: distance, direction, shape and area.

What map shows the most distortion?

A conformal map distorts area—most features are depicted too large or too small. The amount of distortion, however, is regular along some lines in the map. For example, it may be constant along any given parallel.

Which is the best map in the world?

View the world in correct proportions with this map. You may not know this, but the world map you’ve been using since, say, kindergarten, is pretty wonky. The Mercator projection map is the most popular, but it is also riddled with inaccuracies.