NEW YORK (AP) — Maps. Where would we be without them?
And how would we even know?
They can anchor us in a place or help us get somewhere else. They can show us global political realities via the drawing of contested country borders.
We take it as truth that not only does X mark the spot, it shows us the size of the spot, what the spot's name is and how the spot compares with other spots.
But while the physical geography of our world can be set in stone,
the reality is that maps are not. There are choices involved in everything from which countries are centered to their size relative to each other and what the objects on the map are called. The choices create the perspective and they affect the way we assume the world looks.
Where there are choices, there can be contention.
That was evident this month at the United Nations when a General Assembly vote endorsed a map with a different way of looking at the world than has more commonly been used. This map showed Africa more accurately and larger. The vote was 164 countries in favor of the change, six abstaining and one — the United States — against.
In August, President Donald Trump signed an order directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” as a trade war with Canada continues. In January 2025, he signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” Some tech companies such as Google and Apple followed along with the changes for U.S. users. MapQuest did not, nor did Canada.
“To the extent that maps come to shape the way that we think about different places and people who inhabit them, maps structure our politics in ways that then have consequences,” said Alex Moulton, assistant professor in the geography and environmental science department at Hunter College.
There is never going to be a flat map that is 100% accurate to the physical geography it is showing. That is because taking something in 3D, like Earth, and drawing it in flat 2D as a map is always going to result in distortions. Think about trying to flatten an orange's peel.
What mapmakers do is decide which distortions they are going to allow, depending on a map's purpose. Those decisions can be invisible to the general public, who see the map as absolute reality and a foundation for how they think of the world.
Take the Mercator map of Earth. It has been in use for some centuries and is familiar to most of us. It was created in Europe as a navigational tool, with the longitudes and latitudes structured in such a way that ships could get from one place to another.
In order to do that, though, the size of the world's land masses had to be altered. Those nearer the poles, like Greenland, appear bigger. Those nearer the equator, like the countries of Africa, were made smaller. In reality, the African continent is massively larger than Greenland.
It was that distortion that pushed the efforts leading to the U.N.'s vote in support of the Equal Earth projection map, which supporters say is more accurate in terms of size.
Why does that matter? Because the way we see things can impact how we relate to them, with political and economic implications, said Nerve Macaspac, a political geographer and assistant professor at Queens College.
“If you see Africa as a smaller land mass, there’s a political implication to that. If we see it larger or it’s in true size, then there is economic and political implications to it,” Macaspac said. “What’s being foregrounded and what’s been hidden or obscured or neglected or ignored or reduced?"
What is included on maps can also make them snapshots of a particular period.
What was considered the “United States” would look different depending on what point in its 250-year history was being put to paper.
Maps “really are a time capsule of how that cartographer saw the world,” said Tony Rodono, owner of The Map Shop, based in Charlotte, North Carolina. “That was their understanding of world at the particular time with everything that surrounding that person’s human experience.”
Trump's orders to change the names of bodies of water are examples of this as well, as his order renaming the mountain in Alaska that had been called Denali during the Obama administration back to its previous moniker of Mount McKinley. It's the tallest peak in North America.
“Map-making is world-making," Moulton said. “It is apprehending our world as we observe it and then putting that down as the truth of those things and that is an inherently political practice.”
