Mercatorova

Mercatorova is a term used in cartography to refer to the Mercator projection, named after the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator who introduced it in 1569. It is a cylindrical map projection designed to aid navigation by preserving angles locally, making it possible to plot courses with constant bearing as straight lines on the map.

The projection maps the globe onto a cylinder tangent at the equator. Its key characteristic is conformality: angles are preserved, so small shapes look correct in all directions. However, it distorts areas increasingly with latitude, exaggerating the size of lands near the poles. The result is that regions like Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than their actual area relative to equatorial regions. Because scale grows with latitude, distances are most accurate near the equator and become less reliable toward the poles.

History and usage: Mercator published the projection to support maritime navigation, where maintaining direction is crucial. It quickly became a standard tool for nautical charts and later for world maps in education and reference works. In modern practice, a widely used variation is Web Mercator, a spherical approximation adopted by most online map services. While convenient for interactive mapping and navigation, Mercator projections are not suitable for comparing global or regional areas, and they reflect the distortions inherent in projecting a curved surface onto a cylinder.