AP Human Geography Types of Map Projections

Mercator

a map projection that fairly accurately shows shape and direction, but distorts distance and size of land masses.

Sinusoidal

smoothly curving map that accurately presents the center of the map but the remaining is distorted.

Azimuthal (polar)

a map which shows true compass directions; longitude lines are straight and latitude lines are circles; distorts shape and size more toward the outer edges.

Goode's Interrupted Equal Area

Area Projection; shows true size and shape of earth's landmasses

Fuller-Dymaxion

displays the entire world at once with minimal distortion. It looks like a bunch of triangles put together.

Conic

a map projection of the globe onto a cone with its point over one of the earth's poles

Robinson

a projection that maintains overall shapes and relative positions without extreme distortion.

Gall Peters

a projection that displays accurate axes, but shapes are distorted. They are hard to navigate when the shapes are not accurate

Miller

Similar to Mercator projection, but spacing between parallels stops growing after 55 degrees.

Planar

A type of map in which the details of the globe are projected onto a plane (a flat surface) yielding a rectangular-shaped map. Cylindrical maps have a lot of distortion towards the edges.

Molleweide

A projection of a map of the world onto an ellipse, with lines of latitude represented by straight lines (spaced more closely toward the poles) and meridians represented by equally spaced elliptical curves. This projection distorts shape but preserves relative area.

Winkel Tripel

Projection developed in 1921. Minimizes shape distortion in the polar areas and was adopted by NGS (National Geographical Society) in 1998 as official projection.