Mercator vs. Peters Maps

   Today in class, Mr. Schick showed us a regular, flat map of the world. He then showed us another map that looked completely different. On this other map, it seemed more stretched out (vertically). We all thought that this map was either very outdated, when there were no satellites, or was just a very poorly-made map. However, by the end of the class, we realized that it is actually more accurate than the map we are used to seeing! Mr. Schick pulled out a world globe, showing to us what the Earth really looks like, and explained that if you were to travel around the world form the middle of the Earth, it would take longer compared to if you traveled around from the North Pole. This is because the Earth is a sphere, and that is why regular maps are inaccurate. We then watched a video demonstrating an idea (which was the strange-looking map we saw in the beginning of class). It talked about the "Peters Projection Map", and how the size of countries like Greenland and Africa are distorted and are actually different sizes than what we think they are. One quote from the video was, "Here we have Europe drawn considerably larger than South America when it's 6.9 million square miles. South America has almost double the size of Europe's 3.8 million. Alaska appears three times as large as Mexico when Mexico is larger by .1 million square miles." All these different facts/beliefs made us question a lot about what we actually know about the Earth and it's geography.