You've seen it. Honestly, you've probably seen it more than any other map in your entire life. It’s that perfectly rectangular grid where the world looks like a neat spreadsheet. No curves. No complex mathematics visible to the naked eye. Just a big, flat rectangle where the lines of latitude and longitude cross at crisp 90-degree angles. This is the equirectangular projection world map, and despite being one of the oldest and most distorted ways to look at our planet, it is currently more relevant than it has ever been.
Why? Because computers love it.
While the Mercator projection gets all the heat for making Greenland look the size of Africa (which it definitely isn’t), the equirectangular projection is the quiet workhorse of the digital age. If you’ve ever looked at a panoramic photo on your phone or used a VR headset, you were staring at this specific projection. It’s the "raw" format of global data.
The Simple Math of a Flat Earth
Marinus of Tyre gets the credit for this one, way back around AD 100. It’s basically the simplest map you can possibly make. You take the spherical coordinates of the Earth—latitude and longitude—and you just plot them directly onto a Cartesian plane.
$x = \lambda$
$y = \phi$
That’s it. In this formula, $\lambda$ represents longitude and $\phi$ represents latitude. There’s no complex scaling or trigonometric wizardry to preserve area or shape. Because of this simplicity, the map is also known as Plate Carrée, which is French for "flat square."
It’s easy. It’s fast.
But it’s also a mess.
If you look at an equirectangular projection world map, you’ll notice that the poles are stretched into oblivion. On a real globe, the North Pole is a single point. On this map, the North Pole is a horizontal line that stretches across the entire top of the page. It’s the same length as the Equator! That’s a massive geographical lie. In reality, the distance between degrees of longitude shrinks as you move toward the poles. Here? They stay exactly the same distance apart everywhere.
Why We Still Use It (And Why Google Does Too)
You might think we’d have moved on to something more accurate, like the Robinson or the Winkel Tripel. But the equirectangular projection world map has a superpower: its relationship with pixels.
Because the $x$ and $y$ coordinates map directly to longitude and latitude, it is the native format for almost all global datasets. NASA’s "Blue Marble" images? Equirectangular. Deep-sea floor mapping? Equirectangular. When a software developer wants to overlay a temperature map on a globe, they start with this rectangular grid because the math to convert a pixel $(x, y)$ to a location (lat, long) is basically zero. It saves processing power.
Think about 360-degree video. When you see a "flat" version of a VR video before it gets wrapped into a sphere, it looks weirdly stretched at the top and bottom. That’s because it’s stored as an equirectangular image. The software then "re-projects" that flat image onto the inside of a virtual sphere so it looks normal to your eyes.
The Problem of "The Big Top"
The biggest downside is the sheer scale of distortion. In this projection, area is not preserved. Neither is shape. Nor scale.
- Antarctica looks like a giant, endless white continent that takes up the bottom third of the map.
- Greenland looks roughly the same size as South America. In reality, South America is about eight times larger.
- The Equator is the only place where the scale is actually accurate.
If you’re trying to compare the size of countries, this map is your worst enemy. It feeds the misconception that northern countries are much larger than they actually are. However, if you are a pilot or a sailor, you aren't using this for navigation anyway—you're likely using a Mercator because it preserves constant compass bearings (rhumb lines), something the equirectangular map fails at miserably.
Modern Myths and Misconceptions
People often confuse this with the Mercator projection. They aren't the same.
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While both are rectangular, the Mercator projection stretches the vertical distance between latitude lines as you move toward the poles to preserve shapes. The equirectangular projection world map does not. It keeps the spacing between latitude lines perfectly equal. This makes the "Plate Carrée" look "shorter" or more squashed than a Mercator.
Another myth? That it’s "useless."
Hardly. For thematic mapping—like showing where it’s raining across the whole planet at once—it’s the industry standard. Most GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software defaults to a variation of this called WGS84 (EPSG:4326). It’s the "lingua franca" of map data. Even if the final product looks different, the data usually "lives" in an equirectangular state.
How to Actually Use This Information
If you are a student, a designer, or just someone who likes looking at maps, you need to know when to walk away from this projection.
- For Presentations: Stop using it. It looks dated and spreads "geographic illiteracy" regarding country sizes. Use a Robinson or an Equal Earth projection instead.
- For Data Analysis: It’s great. If you’re a coder working with Python or R to map out global stats, keep your data in equirectangular format for the math, but project it to something else for the visual.
- For VR and Photography: It’s essential. If you’re getting into 360-photography, "Equirectangular" is the setting you’ll need to export your files so they work on YouTube or Facebook’s 360-viewers.
The equirectangular projection world map is a classic case of "function over form." It doesn't look like the real world. It doesn't respect the size of Africa or the tiny point of the North Pole. But it speaks the language of computers perfectly.
To see this in action, go to NASA’s Earth Observatory website. Download any global dataset. You’ll find that the "raw" data is almost always a 2:1 aspect ratio rectangle. That is the ghost of Marinus of Tyre still haunting our modern servers.
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Next Steps for Map Enthusiasts
To truly understand how much this projection distorts your view of the world, visit The True Size Of website. Type in a country like "India" or "Democratic Republic of the Congo" and drag it up toward the poles on a rectangular map. You will see the shape bloat and stretch in real-time. This visual exercise is the fastest way to "unlearn" the distortions of the equirectangular grid and develop a more accurate mental model of our planet. For those working in digital media, always ensure your 360-degree assets are exported at exactly a 2:1 ratio (e.g., 4096 x 2048 pixels) to maintain the integrity of the equirectangular standard used by modern VR players.