Every map lies. Choose how.
Switch the projection and watch Greenland, Europe and Africa change size. Mercator keeps the angles, Equal Earth keeps the areas — no flat map can keep both.
Click a country to highlight it, then switch the projection and see how its size changes against the others. Click it again to clear it.
The globe makes a different bargain.
On a sphere, every country keeps its true relative size and the shortest route between two places is the arc you see.
The globe can be turned: drag it with the mouse or a finger and bring any part of the world to the front. What you are looking at is a globe, foreshortened towards the rim with half the Earth always turned away – and that is exactly the price a flat map is trying to avoid.
Built on JSXGraph.
The map and the globe come from JSXGraph Geography, an extension for JSXGraph.
JSXGraph is a powerful open-source JavaScript library for interactive geometry, function plotting, charting and data visualization, developed at the University of Bayreuth. It runs in any browser, on desktop and on mobile, without plug-ins. The extension adds the Earth to it: projections, a turnable globe and geographic elements that work on both.
Who made it.
Dr. Carsten Miller
Executive Director of the
Center for Mobile Learning with Digital Technology
at the University of Bayreuth — the home of JSXGraph.
Contact: carsten.miller@uni-bayreuth.de
Learn more.
Twelve projections, a globe and sixteen elements to build with — every example comes with the code to put it on your own page.