The Foreign Service Journal, December 2018

124 DECEMBER 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL REFLECTIONS Maps Are Useful – But Can Be Misleading BY EDWARD L . PECK W ork in the Foreign Service, dealing with U.S. interests, objectives and activities all over the world, derives some utility from knowing what our three-dimensional Earth really looks like. It cannot be reproduced with anything remotely resembling accuracy on a two- dimensional piece of paper, but aware- ness of the problems resulting from the effort to try can be useful. My interest in maps, which has become a bit of a fixation, began in the fifth grade, when I asked a teacher how Australia, which the map showed as a rather small South Pacific island, could be ranked as a continent. We went down the hall, and for the first time I saw a globe. It revealed that Australia is in fact an extremely large island, and merits the label. But I was puzzled: why the visual disparity? I have since learned. Flattening Earth’s image requires that parts of it be extensively stretched, in width and height, resulting in four highly significant distortions: size, shape, direction and distance. The larger the area covered, and the farther it is from the equator, the greater the distortions (espe- cially east-west). Consider this: the North Pole, which is a point, appears on a map of the world as an area that is 24,000 miles wide—that’s the length of the equator. This explains why Greenland looks huge: Edward L. Peck, a Foreign Service officer from 1956 to 1989, served as chief of mission in Mauritania and Iraq. His other assignments included postings to Sweden, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Ambassador Peck later served as executive secretary of the American Acad- emy of Diplomacy. Currently he travels the world on cruise ships giving lectures on topics such as “Thinking About Our World” and “Representing a Superpower—What American Ambas- sadors Do, and Why They Should be Professionals.” He shares maps of the world with all his audiences, and explains why in this essay. It really isn’t. Americans, who have been raised with and rely on Gerardus Mercator’s 16th-century map, are not aware of how inaccurately it presents the world. For example, the distance from Tokyo to Singapore is actually 210 percent longer than from London to Moscow; yet is only 10 percent longer on the map, because Tokyo-Singapore is more vertical, more north-south, and closer to the equator. London-Moscow is horizontal, more east- west, and farther from the equator. There are additional issues, one of which is to accept memories of what we have seen as representing reality. The United States and Russia are only 55 miles apart in the Bering Sea, but are widely separated visually on most maps. Santiago, Chile, is actually farther east than Key West, Florida. Going through the Panama Canal from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, your ship is actually traveling northwest. The last state you will fly over fromMiami to Tokyo is Alaska, on a Great Circle route, since you cannot do it on a map’s straight line. The distortions are amplified in the Mercator projection map. Because the equator is far below the middle of the Mercator map, the relative size of the Southern Hemisphere in comparison with the Northern Hemisphere is greatly reduced: Europe looks as large as South America. In addition, the 70 percent of Earth’s surface that is water is crammed World Map – Mercator Projection – from 1569. This version produced Mark Lane and MapLink. © 2005 ODT Maps, https://ManyWaysToSeeTheWorld.org