The standard classroom maps we all learned geography from are based on the Mercator projection, a 16th century rendering that preserved lines used for navigation while hideously distorting the true sizes of continents and oceans further from the equator. The result is a widespread misconception that Greenland is as big as Africa, Siberia and Canada are disproportionally massive, and that Antarctica apparently just goes on forever.
In reality though, Africa is larger than all of North America, and the Antarctic is about as big as Australia. A new map created in 2016, the AuthaGraph, however, may be the pinnacle of accuracy.
The 2016 winner of Japan’s prestigious Good Design, Hajime Narukawa, a Tokyo-based architect and artist, broke the globe up into 96 regions and folded it into a tetrahedron and then a pyramid before finally flattening it into a two-dimensional sheet. The multi-step process preserves the true dimensions of the continents by angling them outward instead of stretching them.
By breaking longstanding rules governing how the continents and lines of latitude and longitude should appear, Narukawa has achieved a geographically accurate depiction of Earth. Narukawa says that his map is not quite accurate yet—some regions are slightly distorted. He hopes to perform even more subdivisions of his globe to achieve truly accurate representations of the continents.