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After 457 Years, the UN Approves a New World Map to Show Africa's True Size
interesting | by /u/General_Athlete5807 | 87 comments | 2026-09-05T16:41:42+00:00 Central
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| /u/Commercial_Wind8212 Greenland also looks absurdly large compared to what it looks like at the equator |
| /u/Scottz0rz To be fair, him wanting to own Greenland might have been 90% driven by him seeing how bigly it was on the Mercator map and him wanting to greatly embiggen the US on the map. In fact, I'm convinced he only knows things that are on the board game Risk. r/MapPorn/comments/vg0o3d/the_world_map_according_to_th e_board_game_risk/ He wants to annex Canada, Greenland, and Central America so that he gets the +5 troops bonus, and he needs to control Venezuela to control entry into the South, clearly. |
| /u/AznNRed I actually do believe Trump is motivated by size. If he claimed Canada or Greenland, the USA would be the largest country by land mass. You know Trump is always compensating for his little cheetoh |
| /u/SherbetMysterious118 Hhaha, like he'd have the mental capacity to understand Risk. |
| /u/Sooribabu_Lavangam According to reddit, it's both super important to Africa for it to be bigger, but also pathetic that the US even cared enough to vote against this. |
| /u/Gavorn It's an actual thing, when kids see something bigger our dumb monkey brains attribute it to being better. It's also not just according to reddit, it's according to the whole world. |
| /u/Upbeat_Anywhere_1316 We talking length or girth? |
| /u/Dr3s99 What do you expect from the administration changing Lake names |
| /u/TethysOfTheStars I (unfortunately American) was sitting here watching this like "1 against? Which country would be petty and insecure enough to vote against?" *sigh* I deeply wish I was less surprised by the answer. |
| /u/Front-Song8863 I saw only one country voted against it and I immediately knew who it was |
| /u/Gato_pima Frankly I'm surprised they couldn't convince any other country to vote no, as it happened other times |
| /u/tolgren Most likely they didn't care enough to use any capital on it. |
| /u/mightymidwestshred To avoid being "woke" |
| /u/PWModulation It's painful how true this is. |
| /u/Austinp-woodworking this is pretty much exactly it - Beyond enriching Trump and his buddies, the entire MAGA platform basically boils down to just doing things they know will upset people they don't like |
| /u/Exotic_Insurance2164 For me, it was a toss up between USA or Israel. |
| /u/PerplexityRivet . . . Israel has had universal healthcare since the 90's. |
| /u/acemonsoon i mean i saw all the plus signs and i was like oh wow cool, then i looked and saw ONE against, was kinda giddy to see who the asshole was. then i saw the red by United states and i got the big sad. |
| /u/justk4y Of course the US is the only one against it 💀 |
| /u/Lost-Comfort-7904 Couldn't convince one nation to stand with them. |
| /u/TheLonleyJourneyman Not even Israel stood with them on this one |
| /u/DefinitionTop3930 I'm genuinely interested to know how these decisions are contemplated by diplomats and their teams, like what could the possible reason be to vote against this |
| /u/Narrow_Composer8219 The irony here is hilarious. The country whose president is worried about renovating reflecting pools, putting names on theatres, and building ballrooms is telling the rest of the world their priorities are wrong and to get back to work on real issues. What a joke. |
| /u/FutureShockDaily It's even more ironic since Trump literally just decided that Lake Ontario is now called Lake America and him and his supporters threw a fit at Mapquest for not immediately changing the name lol |
| /u/_Insensitive_Clod_ Not to mention the nation that decided that it was, somehow, super necessary to rename a lake through a presidential order. But.. can't vote 'yes' or even just abstain on something the rest of the world agrees is a good idea. US seems to become the Hungary of the world, at this point. |
| /u/AssassisnCreedFan "Sir, this makes our country smaller. We can't vote yes." |
| /u/medyolang_ i'm interested to hear why |
| /u/please_trade_marner This map was promoted by African countries as it more accurately shows the size of every country, most especially Africa as a whole. The resolution quite literally doesn't actually do anything. It's just the UN saying "This is the UN prefered map projection". The Mercator map distorts land size the further it gets from the equator, but it is superior in many other ways. Google maps will continue using mercator because actually getting where you're going is more favorable than "fairer" land sizes. The rest of the world pretty much said "In support of our african friends, we'll vote in favor of this powerless and meaningless resolution" and America said "nope". |
| /u/andouconfectionery The thing about Google Maps is that you can zoom in. And you can selectively project exactly the part of the globe you're trying to look at. It'll draw straight lines for you. It'll draw whatever angle you want. With how far navigation tech has advanced, there's basically no other point to using an entire paper world map besides exactly what this new map is better at - getting a sense of geographical scale between different parts of the world. |
| /u/Mendicant__ It's not powerless and meaningless though. The UN has a bunch of use cases for a world map and few of them need to preserve angles or shapes. if you're publishing a map of global disease incidence an equal area map is obviously superior to one where uninhabited polar regions account for a third of the space on it. There are tradeoffs when you switch from a sports car to an economy coup to a dump truck but if you tried to use this "you're trading one issue for another" reasoning in a fleet management meeting youd be laughed out of the room |
| /u/sohblob The resolution quite literally doesn't actually do anything. It's just the UN saying "This is the UN prefered map projection" When you try getting humans to do anything, you learn that standards-setting actually does a lot. |
| /u/d5c7 the us being the only opposing vote is frying me |
| /u/bottledgallium Like a scared turtle. |
| /u/GreySoulx Now that you mention him, where IS Mitch McConnel? |
| /u/GreySoulx I'm honestly amazed they haven't wheeled his corpse into the capital to "vote" at this point. |
| /u/Professional-Swan-18 Like a frightened turtle!! |
| /u/PhrostySnowman https://reddit.com/link/p80ajku/video/ornryyo7kqnh1/play er |
| /u/Finlandia1865 I mean technically denmark shrank the most relative to their size :P |
| /u/ratskim A Finn stirring up the Danes? 🤣🤣 |
| /u/Weekly-Beginning-229 Should have shrunk even more! But at least it's a nice place to make a parking lot out of // Swede |
| /u/HamsterAdditional748 THEY WERE IN THE POOOOOL!!! |
| /u/More_Passenger3988 lol. Seinfeld never gets old. |
| /u/becken_bruch Just wait for the tweets tonight. Let's see what donny thinks. |
| /u/rackfloor Once Natalie prints this out he's gonna be pissed. |
| /u/Redcarborundum The top guy in the US is renaming maps and putting his name on stuff, and you wonder why he doesn't want a map that shrinks USA? |
| /u/bulk_logic US voted against food being a universal right under Biden as well as against Palestinian UN representation while saying he was doing the most to protect Palestine against genocide, because we said Israel should be involved with Palestinian representation. US votes oppressively all of the time when it's against its empire's interest. |
| /u/Business-Active-1143 And used 2/3rds of it's veto on shielding Israel |
| /u/Elastigirlwasbetter The funny thing is that it doesn't shrink the US. It no longer enlarges it. It shows the true size (or at least way closer to the true proportions) But yes, its painfully obvious why they are the only ones who voted no. |
| /u/Zombies4EvaDude Well obviously they would; accurate maps make them look bigger. But on the other hand there was a vote on making food a human right and America (with Israel) voted against while Russia and North Korea still supported it. The U.S. is comically evil and greedy it's pathetic |
| /u/motorcycletreebark To be fair, neither map is accurate. The world is a globe. Any flat map is going to have distortions. This one is "more fair" but it's still a projection |
| /u/Electronic_Tap_8052 It's not "more fair", its just wrong in a different way. You can preserve size or shape but never both. It's also "wrong" to put north at the top and south at the bottom. There's no reason for north to be at the top. It's just convention. |
| /u/superbabe69 You can actually preserve size and shape. You just then lose all relativity between land masses/countries because they can't be at the same relative angle or distance to/from each other. To your point, yeah you can't have an "accurate" 2D map of a 3D Earth. |
| /u/Icy_Construction_394 Well in terms of contribution to budget US pays the most 22%, while Russia pays a measly 2.1% and North Korea paying 0.004%. So yeah they wouldn't care either way. Anytime they vote to do stuff it's with other countries money |
| /u/MechanicLoose2634 I was going to ask who was against. I should have known. 😂 |
| /u/I-screwed-up-bad As an American I had a gut feeling it was us. You know the kind that makes you go, "Please please don't be us"? |
| /u/CheekyMonkE "I have now signed an Executive Order making the former Africa, now known as Little America the 51st state....." |
| /u/BobaFett0451 He would try to deport them |
| /u/klezart He and his would probably gladly bring back slavery, though. Outside of our typical prison labor type slavery, I mean. |
| /u/quintiliahan The weirdest thing is some of his are black people who would somehow pretzel themselves up to support it too. |
| /u/Recent_Mouse3037 Probably cause the map has Lake Ontario and Gulf of Mexico on it |
| /u/BleuBrink It's actually because Trump wants to take over Greenland which looks yuge on the mercator projection. In 2021, Trump exclaimed, "I love maps. And I always said, 'Look at the size of this. It's massive, and that should be part of the United States.'" https://www.afr.com/world/europe/the-trouble-with-maps- greenland-s-allure-for-trump-is-based-on-an-illusion-202 60122-p5nw68 |
| /u/Odd_Inter3st We really are the Florida of the world... |
| /u/Funny-Flower-3980 Fuck dude you're right... |
| /u/RBLakshya Trump is shy about his size |
| /u/rochey64 Of course. Now it's United States of Africa. |
| /u/Inevitable_Two2042 Team "One World Government" is immune to irony. |
| /u/TyrannyOfBobBarker_ You better chill or he will rename Africa trumprica. |
| /u/Separate_Sea8717 What did you expect? |
| /u/Supergirl016 there are other countries apart from USA????? is this even possible???? |
| /u/Livelens-AV I was coming to the comments to see what country voted against. In my gut, I already knew it was the U.S. The very first comment confirmed it. |
| /u/BenHeli It's no surprise, have you seen the US on the world stage the last years? |
| /u/PoetInCrocs I'd love to know why the US opposed. I'm sure there's a very good reason. A tremendous reason, better than ever before. They didn't have a reason two years ago, but now they have the best reason in the world, even their enemies are saying that. |
| /u/LittelXman808 Iirc the reason was basically (paraphrasing) "we are against this because there is no reason to switch out one inaccurate projection for another" |
| /u/Silverfire12 An accurate statement. To be completely frank, flat maps cannot be accurate. Ever. You can't flatten a 3D object like Earth into a flat plane. We shouldn't be using flat maps to teach the shapes and sizes of the continents- we need to be using globes |
| /u/Inquisitor-Korde We do use globes to teach. But flat maps are everywhere too, we can afford to update those occasionally. |
| /u/5a1vy Well, shit, I guess I'll be a pedantic asshole today. It's not that the Earth is 3D what makes all flat maps wrong, a cylinder is also 3D and can have a perfect map (also, the surface of the Earth is 2D, just like the surface of a cylinder, but whatever), but rather that a sphere has intrinsic curvature and a flat plain doesn't (a cylinder's surface also has no intrinsic curvature, even though it has extrinsic curvature). Everything else is right, I just wanted to note that it's not about the dimension, but (intrinsic) curvature. P.S. On that note, a 4D torus (the surface of a 4D donut, if you like) is also intrinsically flat, so we might have perfect maps even of higher dimensional objects. In fact, the Pacman's map is an example. |
| /u/mmmfggh What do you mean by pacmans map as an example? |
| /u/JMHMJ It folds around itself in two directions because you can travel go left from the map and appear right, and go up from the map and appear down. This is only possible on a torus shaped object (and a 4D(?) one because all sides of the map are equal) |
| /u/Below-Average-528 This would make sense if, on the other hand, they wouldn't rename lakes and gulfs for no good reason |
| /u/letthecoolguy I mean you can oppose both the wierd performative renaming of landmarks and the wierd performative changing of the old world map for a new one that is also imperfect but just in a different way |
| /u/etherealtwo You can but in this case they are for renaming landmarks in their image and against adjusting the world map in someone else's. They're not for or against both. |
| /u/Rk_1138 Tbh there's truth to that, this is just a symbolic and performative gesture |
| /u/stormdraggy Mercator actually has a valid use case unlike this one. |
| /u/bargu Mercator is a navigation map, unless the UN is in the business of sailing ships around the globe there's no reason for them to use it, and since the UN actual business is representing the nations of earth having a map that's a bit more accurate in that regard is a completely valid use case. They are not forcing anyone into replacing Mercator with the new map. |
| /u/Rk_1138 That too, the "Mercator projection is racist" thing is such a stupid terminally online take imo. I'm willing to bet that most African people don't really care that much about which map is being used |
| /u/UnknownVC It really is. Mercator is designed to perserve angular direction (and shape) for navigation. Because it's cylindrical, it breaks down near the poles, but for basically all navigational use cases it works. The size distortions aren't intentional, they fall out of the math, and any map that preserves angular direction is going to screw up areas - that is literally a property of the mathematics of projecting a sphere onto a plane. All map projections are wrong, but some are useful. Generally, the most useful ones preserve direction for navigation and not area. |