That really has no greater area accuracy. The northern hemisphere is as distorted as usual near the north pole, look at Greenland. They appear to have hidden the distortion at the South pole by omitting it. There should be a whole continent there.
I think it is just a Mercator projection, inverted, and relabelled. The meredians are not parallels, they converge to a point at the north and south poles. You can't project a round earth on a flat surface accurately. All map projections have major distortions hiding somewhere if they cover a large area. Different projections have pros and cons for different purposes. You have to pick one that suits the purpose best, but it will always suit some other purpose poorly. In the Southern hemisphere, the only major land mass south of 55°S is Antartica, which they omitted, so the distortion is well-hidden. In the Northern hemisphere, omitting land north of 55°N would be rather obvious. ________________________________ From: Pat Naughtin <[email protected]> To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, July 8, 2010 4:07:35 AM Subject: [USMA:48087] Where are you? Dear All, My wife and I watched a DVD of 'The West Wing' today. It was about 'Cheese Day' and a segment involved maps that had accurate area measurement rather than northern hemisphere prejudices, especially European prejudices. I research this and found this: http://flourish.org/upsidedownmap/mcarthur-large.jpg Cheers, Pat Naughtin Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, see http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html Hear Pat speak at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lshRAPvPZY PO Box 305 Belmont 3216, Geelong, Australia Phone: 61 3 5241 2008 Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for their businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many different trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA. Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST, and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com/ to subscribe.
