APHG Unit 1: Identifying Projections

The relative sizes of the landmasses on the map are the same as in reality. The projection minimizes distortion in the shapes of most landmasses. Areas toward the North and South poles, such as Greenland and Australia become more distorted, but they are sparsely inhabited, so distorting their shapes usually is not important. However, by allocating space to the oceans, the land areas are much smaller than on interrupted maps of the same size.

Winkel projection

Shape is distorted very little, direction is consistent, and pa is rectangular. However, relative sizes grossly distorted toward the poles, makin high-latitude places such as Antarctica look much larger than they actually are.

Mercator projection

This projection separates the Eastern and Western hemispheres into tow pieces, a feature known as interruption. It gives more prominence to the landmasses. The meridians (the vertical lines), form right angles with parallels (the horizontal lines) on a globe, but not in this projection.

Goode homolosine projection

This projection does not distort relative size but does distort shape.

Gall-Peters projection