Mercator projection

The Mercator projection maps Earth onto a cylinder, preserving local angles and shapes while enlarging areas increasingly toward the poles. It represents rhumb lines as straight lines.

Map projection: A mathematical method for representing Earth's curved surface on a flat map. The Mercator projection is one specific way to flatten the globe.
Marine navigation: The practice of planning and conducting travel by sea. Straight rhumb lines made the projection useful for plotting constant-bearing courses.
Gall–Peters projection: An equal-area cylindrical map projection that preserves area but distorts shapes. It prioritizes area accuracy where Mercator prioritizes local angles.
Greenland: The world's largest island, located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans. Its apparent size on Mercator maps greatly exceeds its area relative to equatorial regions.
Conformal map projection: A map projection that preserves angles and local shapes at each point. Conformality is the defining geometric property of the Mercator projection.
Web Mercator: A spherical variant of the Mercator projection widely used by online map tiles. It adapts Mercator's geometry to standardized, square web-map grids.
Robinson projection: A compromise world-map projection designed to balance several kinds of distortion. It offers a less extreme overall appearance than Mercator for world maps.
Africa: The world's second-largest continent, crossed by the equator and surrounded by the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Its lower-latitude area appears comparatively diminished beside northern lands on Mercator maps.
Mercator latitude: The transformed latitude coordinate used to place locations on the Mercator projection's vertical axis. Its nonlinear growth toward the poles produces the projection's characteristic spacing.
Google Maps: A web-based mapping service that provides maps, satellite imagery, and route planning. Its familiar global map display uses Web Mercator.

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