The shape of Earth as a sphere has been known to humankind for a very long time. However, in all this time, humans have misrepresented the shape of the planet quite knowingly. No, not with flat-earth conspiracies, but actual scientists as well. Ever since school days, we were taught to recognise the cities, counties, and continents on a flat paper map. Why that creates a problem is obvious; Earth is round, and when one tries to ‘flatten’ in on a map, shapes and sizes of various countries is misrepresented. But a group of scientists has created the world’s first two-side round map, which is about as accurate as a map can ever be.
Astrophysicist J Richard Gott led the team who created this phenomenal new map. He mentioned that the new map is "actually more like the globe than other flat maps." While we usually rotate the globes to locate places, for the new map one has to simply flip it over.
To know how accurate a map is, Goldberg-Gott score is used by cartographers. It looks at six major distortions that happen in 2-D representation --local shapes, distance, areas, bending, skewness or lopsidedness and boundary cuts. Unlike high school marks, this map score should be as low as possible to be near-perfect. For reference, the globe has a Goldberg-Gott score of 0. The new map by Gott, Robert Vanderbei and David Goldberg has an impressive score of 0.881.
The two most widely used maps in books are the Winkel Tripel flat map projection (score 4.563) and the Mercator projection (score 8.296).The new map has set a record as least distance errors than any single-sided map.
Gott explained how Mercator and Winkel Tripel projections have massive errors as one nears the poles. For example, in many maps, you would notice Africa, a huge continent, is often similar in size to Greenland, a tiny island. The distance between Greenland and the North American continent is also erroneous.
According to the team, the new map should be ideally printed on cardboard or plastic. This way, they can be stacked like vinyl records and stored together in a box or slipped inside the covers of textbooks. However, it will be available to print even on regular paper.