10 Maps That Are Lying to You

Every map you have ever looked at is wrong. Some of them are wrong on purpose, some are wrong because of a mathematical impossibility proved in 1827, and one of them is wrong because two draughtsmen invented a town in the 1930s and somebody went and built it. Counting down ten of them: why Greenland looks fourteen times bigger than it is, the theorem that means no flat map can ever be correct, the place at 0,0 where the world's broken data goes, a monument that is a third of a mile from where it should be and legally correct anyway, a town where the border runs through people's houses, the land that two countries both refuse to claim, an island that sat on charts for 130 years over two kilometres of open water, and the Prime Meridian, which is about a hundred metres from where everyone stands to photograph it. SOURCES REFERENCED Gerardus Mercator, 1569, and the navigational purpose of the projection Carl Friedrich Gauss, Theorema Egregium (1827) Nicolas Auguste Tissot and the indicatrix Al-Idrisi, Tabula Rogeriana, 1154 Why the Greenwich Meridian Moved - Stephen Malys et al., Journal of Geodesy (2015) National Geodetic Survey statement on the Four Corners monument (2009) Maria Seton, University of Sydney, and the RV Southern Surveyor un-discovery of Sandy Island (2012) Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers, General Drafting Company, on the invention of Agloe Which one did you already know, and which one have I missed? Comment below. Subscribe for a new long-form geography documentary every week.