Mercatorprojekció

Mercatorprojekció is a cylindrical map projection developed by Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It was created for navigational purposes, allowing sailors to plot a course of constant bearing, known as a rhumb line, as a straight segment on the map. This feature made it incredibly useful for long-distance sea travel.

The Mercator projection preserves angles and shapes locally, meaning that small features are not distorted in appearance. However, it achieves this by distorting area. As the latitude increases towards the poles, the landmasses and oceans appear increasingly stretched and exaggerated in size. This is why Greenland, for example, appears much larger on a Mercator map than it is in reality, while equatorial regions are relatively compressed.

Despite its significant area distortion, the Mercator projection remains widely used, particularly for web maps and nautical charts, due to its ease of use for navigation and its familiar representation of the Earth's surface. Alternative projections exist that aim to represent area more accurately, but they often sacrifice the straight-line representation of rhumb lines. The fundamental trade-off in map projections between preserving area, shape, or distance is clearly illustrated by the Mercator projection.