‘We need messier maps’

From President Trump’s bid to acquire Greenland to Beijing’s claims over the South China Sea, cartographer William Rankin tells Mike Higgins how maps sometimes don’t help geopolitical decision-making.

The World Today

Published 16 March 2026 — 5 minute READ

Image — Rankin says that the Mercator map projection, which greatly distorts the true size of Greenland, is rarely used in atlases today. Illustration: Alexander Ecob

William Rankin

Cartographer and author

Mike Higgins

Editor, The World Today, Communications and Publishing

You are a cartographer – what have you made of the coverage of Donald Trump’s bid to claim Greenland for the United States, particularly the use of maps? 

There has been lots of chatter online about how the Mercator map projection makes Greenland look huge. No geographer in a hundred years has thought the Mercator projection is a good choice for a world map, and it barely even appears in atlases today. But I haven’t seen any evidence that Trump is being bamboozled by the Mercator projection, or that he cares only about the apparent size of Greenland. 

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