The UN general assembly voted this month to adopt the new map, which more accurately represents the sizes of all continents, particularly Africa. It is hoped the projection will gradually replace Mercator on school walls and government websites.

Put forward by Togo, the proposal was hugely successful, with 164 countries voting in favour. The only “no” vote came from the US, whose UN representative, Yaryna Ferencevych, said resolutions such as the “correct the map” effort were “barnacles on our work here”. The US is one of the countries that appears smaller on the new projection. It also makes Greenland – a territorial prize Donald Trump has openly coveted as a “big beautiful piece of ice” – seem significantly less dominant.

Six other nations abstained from the vote, and Patterson said he had been contacted by diplomats from government embassies in Washington DC looking for clarification.

Japan asked for a revision because it said the map made the disputed Kuril Islands appear to belong to Russia by putting them in the same shade of yellow. Ukraine also abstained, as Russian-occupied Crimea was a different colour to the rest of the country. Ukraine’s representatives at the UN said this opened a “Pandora’s box” and violated international law.

The cartographers see these objections as stemming from something of a misunderstanding. The map voted on at the UN is simply a mathematical projection of the land and sea, without human-made borders or shading. The confusion arose due to a website run by Patterson that offers free Equal Earth projections. He had annotated these with geopolitical lines and the names of countries, and has been rushing this week to update them, including switching colours and changing spellings, such as Turkey to Türkiye.

“I view the Equal Earth maps as living documents and am grateful for the many helpful suggestions that I have received,” he said.

Patterson developed the new projection in 2018 with a California-based software engineer, Bojan Šavrič, the “maths wizard” of the trio, and Bernhard Jenny, an associate professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Jenny said people generally believed maps were accurate representations of the Earth, but that logic breaks down because we live on a curved surface. This creates a problem, as a sphere cannot easily be transformed into a flat rectangle.

“It’s like the orange peel analogy,” said Jenny. “You have to tear it and stretch it, and it’s not possible to flatten it out … so you have to make compromises.”

One global map, called the Goode homolosine projection, looks strikingly like a ripped-up orange peel. Its main problems are that it is not very pleasing to the human eye and not very easy to use for navigation – something the flawed Mercator excels at, because north is always up.

For Jenny, cartography is about aesthetics as well as science. “We cartographers say cartography is the art and science of making maps. So it’s kind of the combination of the two.”

Equal Earth is not the first attempt to address Mercator’s shortcomings. Several other projections were developed in the past century, including the Gall-Peters model, which shows the true relative sizes of land masses, but which often appears oddly elongated, almost like the continents are drooping. Jenny said: “There was a lot of backlash from cartographers who said: ‘Well, it looks like clothes are hung up to dry.’”

There are always compromises when making maps. Spend any amount of time with a cartographer and what might seem like fundamental truths quickly break down. “Which way is up?” or “Where is the centre” are not simple questions for cartographers – ancient Islamic maps had a south-up orientation, which put the holy city of Mecca in the eyeline. A London-centric worldview has long dominated how world maps are presented, with Greenwich in the centre.

“You have to make compromises,” said Jenny. The Equal Earth map, for example, would not be useful for getting around, as countries on the edges are squeezed. In fact, if any country had a claim to be upset, it could be New Zealand, which is stretched and distorted, and on the edge of the map.

“A map is never neutral,” said Jenny. “So you cannot please everyone.”

Šavrič, who worked on the mathematical formula, said he never imagined eight years ago that the trio’s research would be discussed at the highest levels.

“What pleases me more is that this creates a valuable opportunity to strengthen map literacy and raise awareness that there is no single map projection capable of providing a completely ‘true’ representation of the world,” he said. “Every map projection involves trade-offs. I particularly appreciate that the [UN] resolution does not completely ban the Mercator projection or mandate a single replacement for all maps.”

Jenny was also thrilled, watching on from Australia. “It’s kind of a cartographer’s dream, right?” he said. “The fact that the UN is debating map projections for an entire hour is already totally thrilling for cartographers, and then it was our map projection. I mean, what else can you ask for?”

He does, however, have a hunch that another factor helped the Equal Earth map: the power of a good name. “I think, definitely, that you know what it is immediately,” said Jenny. If they had called it the “Šavrič-Patterson-Jenny projection”, he joked, maybe it would not have done so well.

Header image is A Correct Sea Chart of the Whole World, According to Wright’s Commonly Called Mercator’s Projection, made in 1728. Courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection