Among the many map designs that have been developed over time, the most popular is the Mercator projection. According to National Geographic, this map style was designed by Gerardus Mercator, a 16th-century geographer born in Flanders (part of modern-day Belgium). When Mercator was born, the so-called "New World" had just been discovered, and an era of global exploration was underway. Mercator wanted to develop a map of the entire Earth which could help sailors navigate effectively.
In 1569, Mercator released that map. It followed a new projection system that Mercator had personally designed. He essentially remodeled the Earth as a cylinder, then "unfurled" it with his map. With this projection, all of the globe's latitude and longitude lines are shown intersecting at perfect 90 degree angles. This isn't accurate, but it helps navigators plan straight courses to their destinations.
While effective for navigation, there were some major flaws with Mercator's map. It did a decent job showing the right shape of the world's land masses, but horribly distorted their sizes. Under Mercator's system, everything close to Earth's equator is depicted small and compact, while land masses near the poles are shown way larger than they are in reality. This is most obvious in the way that Greenland (in the north) and Antarctica (in the south) appear gigantic. Unfortunately, Mercator's map was so useful for navigation that it became the international standard, even into the modern era.
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