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The UN just voted 164-1 to retire Mercator. Great news for how Africa and Latin America look on a map. But here's the twist: almost nothing you see daily is even "true" Mercator - it's Web Mercator, EPSG:3857, built for map tiles, not 16th-century navigation.

9/9/26, 8:44 am2 reposts8 likes

Dr. Dominic Royé

@drxeo.eu

9 Sept

And "GPS projection" (usually meant as EPSG:4326) isn't a projection at all - just lat/lon plotted raw on a flat grid. A real 1x1 degree cell at 60N is a tall rectangle. Plotted in 4326 it's a wrong-shaped square. Reprojected to 3857 it's the right shape, just inflated.

Dr. Dominic Royé

@drxeo.eu

9 Sept

I surveyed this for Geoscience Communication: of 299 maps in 27 geoscience journals, only 1.7% name their projection, 44% give no way to tell, and just 16% draw a graticule. doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2026-4209 #MapProjections #GIS #Cartography

doi.orgGC Insights: Choosing the right map projection, and what it means for scale bars and north arrowsAbstract. Map projection choice is usually left to software defaults, yet it determines whether spatial patterns are shown faithfully or systematically distorted. Because every projection trades area,...