{
  "type": "article",
  "title": "UN votes to scrap the 450-year-old map that made Africa look small",
  "summary": "The UN General Assembly has voted 164-1 to move away from the centuries-old Mercator map that has long made Africa appear far smaller than it really is, with the United States opposing the change.",
  "content": "The next time you glance at a world map, look twice, because the version most of us grew up with is on its way out. Nothing is shifting on the ground, no border is moving and no country is losing an inch of territory, but on paper the proportions of the planet are set for a major correction after the United Nations agreed that the map hanging in classrooms, printed in atlases and built into phone apps has been distorting the world for roughly four and a half centuries.\n\nThe vote in New York\nThe push to retire this map, formally known as the Mercator projection, came to a head at the UN General Assembly in New York. A resolution calling for the world to move away from the old projection was put to a vote, and 164 countries backed it. The United States was the only country to vote against the change, while six countries chose not to take a position either way. Passing a resolution at the UN does not force any single country to switch overnight, since there is no rule dictating which map a school or government must hang on its wall. But a UN-backed resolution carries weight, it opens the door for schools and colleges, official government paperwork, international organisations and even the mapping tools built by technology companies to start adopting a corrected version instead of the one everyone has used since childhood.\n\nWhere the complaint started\nThe controversy did not begin at the UN, it began with African nations pointing out something that had bothered them for years, the standard map makes Africa look smaller than it actually is, squeezing and flattening a continent that is, in reality, enormous. The African Union ran a campaign around this complaint, Togo formally carried the resolution to the UN General Assembly, and France backed the push. Their argument went beyond aesthetics, a map is not just a piece of paper, they said, it settles into how people picture the world in their heads. A distorted map quietly shapes assumptions about which regions matter, which look big and important and which look small and marginal. That argument fed into an online push under the hashtag #correctthemap, where people pointed out that the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico and a large chunk of Europe could all be placed inside Africa's outline and there would still be room to spare, something the familiar map never lets you see.\n\nWhy a flat sheet of paper can never get a globe right\nTo understand why the map ended up this way, it helps to think about the basic problem cartographers were always up against, the Earth is round like an orange, but a map has to be flat. Peel an orange in one piece and try to lay that peel flat on a table, and it will tear apart at the top and bottom while the middle, where it curved out the most, holds its shape reasonably well. Something similar happens when you flatten a map of the globe. Around the equator, where the planet bulges out the most and where Africa happens to sit, the shapes stayed close to accurate. But countries further from the equator, stretching up toward the North Pole, had to be pulled and stretched to fill the flat sheet, and that stretching is exactly what makes Russia, Greenland and Canada look so oversized.\n\nThe Flemish mapmaker behind the lines\nThe specific version of the flat map that spread around the world traces back to one man, Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer who drew it in 1569, which is why it is still called the Mercator projection today. He was not trying to represent every country's true size, he was solving a navigation problem. Ships heading out to sea needed the shortest, most direct route to their destination, and Mercator's projection allowed sailors to draw a single straight line on the map and follow that exact compass bearing to arrive where they intended. For sailors and ship captains, that made it an extraordinarily useful tool, and it is precisely why the map spread so widely, ending up on classroom walls, printed inside textbooks and eventually built into modern tools like Google Maps.\n\nHow far off the sizes really are\nThe trouble is that the same projection that made compass navigation simple also badly distorts how big countries appear, and the distortion gets worse the further you move from the equator. Greenland, for instance, appears on the standard map to be roughly the same size as Africa, when in reality Africa is about fourteen times larger than Greenland. Europe and North America both look inflated, Russia and Canada are stretched out well beyond their true proportions, while Africa, Latin America and the countries sitting close to the equator end up looking smaller and more compressed than they actually are. Put another way, the map has spent four and a half centuries convincing readers that the northern hemisphere carries more landmass than it does, while continents nearer the equator quietly lose ground on paper even though they lose nothing in reality.\n\nWhat happens from here\nThe map was originally built to solve one specific job, helping ships find direction at sea, but over time it became the default picture of the world that ended up everywhere from geography lessons to news broadcasts. With the resolution now passed at the UN General Assembly, no country is being compelled to swap out its maps immediately, and the United States has already signalled it does not support the change. Even so, the vote sets the stage for schools, colleges, government departments, international institutions and the technology companies behind digital maps to gradually shift toward a version that reflects the true scale of countries like Africa, rather than the four-hundred-and-fifty-year-old projection built for sailors that the world has been looking at ever since. For anyone who has used a paper map, studied geography in school, or simply looked at a world map on a wall, the switch means the picture in front of them may finally match the planet it is supposed to represent.\n\nWhat this means for you\nThis change will not alter anyone's daily life overnight, but it does affect how the world gets taught, printed and displayed to people everywhere, including in India.\n\n• Students and textbooks: Once schools, colleges and publishers start adopting the corrected map, geography lessons and atlases will show Africa, Latin America and equatorial countries closer to their real size. Anyone studying world geography from a new edition will see a noticeably different Africa than earlier generations did.\n• Map apps and digital tools: Technology companies that build map products, including tools like Google Maps that rely on similar projections, may eventually shift toward the corrected version. Users may notice country proportions looking different from what they are used to.\n• No forced switch yet: Because the United States voted against the resolution and there is no binding rule on which map any country must use, the familiar Mercator-style map will keep appearing in many places for now. Nobody needs to throw out an old atlas or textbook immediately.\n• Official documents and institutions: Government departments and international organisations that reference world maps in reports or presentations now have a UN-backed basis to switch to the corrected version. This could gradually change how countries are visually represented in official material, including in India.\n• General awareness: The next time a world map is shared or printed, readers now have a reason to double-check whether it is showing countries at their true relative size, particularly Africa, Greenland, Russia and Canada.\n\nWhy this happened\nThe distortion is not a mistake or an accident, it is a direct side effect of the method Gerardus Mercator used in 1569 to solve a navigation problem, and the push to fix it now comes from a specific, named campaign rather than a sudden change of mind at the UN.\n\n• The direct cause is mathematical, not political: Flattening a round globe onto flat paper cannot preserve both shape and size everywhere at once. Mercator's projection preserved straight-line compass directions for sailors, but that choice meant land far from the equator had to stretch to fill the flat sheet.\n• The chain of events that led to this vote: African nations had long objected that the standard map shrank Africa's true size. The African Union built a campaign around the complaint, Togo formally brought the resolution to the UN General Assembly, and France supported it, turning a long-standing grievance into a formal vote.\n• Online pressure added momentum: The #correctthemap campaign spread the argument publicly, using comparisons like fitting the US, China, India, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe inside Africa's outline to make the scale of distortion visible to ordinary people, not just cartographers.\n• What typically follows a UN resolution like this: Since the resolution is not binding, adoption usually happens gradually as schools, governments and companies choose to update their materials, rather than through any single enforced deadline.\n\nQuestions & Answers\n\n1. Why is the world map being changed?\nBecause the map most people use, based on the Mercator projection, makes some countries look far bigger than they really are while shrinking others, especially Africa.\n\n2. Who voted to change it, and where?\nThe UN General Assembly in New York voted on the resolution, with 164 countries voting in favour.\n\n3. Did every country support the change?\nNo, the United States voted against it, and 6 countries did not take a position.\n\n4. Who created the original map, and when?\nGerardus Mercator, a Flemish cartographer, created it in 1569, which is why it is called the Mercator projection.\n\n5. Why was the map originally designed that way?\nIt was built for ships at sea, allowing sailors to draw a straight line and follow a single compass direction to reach their destination.\n\n6. How much bigger is Africa than it appears next to Greenland?\nOn the map they look similar in size, but Africa is actually about fourteen times larger than Greenland.\n\n7. Will maps change immediately everywhere?\nNo, adoption is not mandatory, but the resolution opens the way for schools, governments, institutions and tech companies to gradually switch to a corrected map.",
  "url": "https://trendkia.com/en/world/aphrika-ko-chhota-dikhane-vala-450-sala-purana-naksha-aba-united-nations-ne-thukaraya-29419",
  "category": "World",
  "publishedAt": "2026-09-08",
  "tags": [
    "United Nations",
    "Mercator map",
    "Africa",
    "World map",
    "Gerardus Mercator",
    "African Union"
  ],
  "language": "en",
  "site": "TrendKia"
}