BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts Hello and thanks for downloading the More or Less Podcast, with a programme that looks at the numbers in the news, in life and in odd-shaped maps of the world. I'm Tim Harford. The global news story of the week has undoubtedly been Greenland, the vast arctic island and autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. This week it's found itself at the centre of a geopolitical crisis. It's the United States alone that can protect this giant mass of land, this giant piece of ice, develop it and improve it and make it so that it's good for Europe and safe for Europe and good for us. And that's the reason I'm seeking immediate negotiations to once again discuss the acquisition of Greenland by the United States. President Trump says he won't go ahead with the trade tariffs he'd threatened to impose on allied countries that have supported Denmark's sovereignty over Greenland. Mr Trump said a meeting with the head of NATO, Mark Rutter, had led to the framework of a potential deal covering Greenland and the arctic region. As with any geopolitical crisis, it's always good to remind ourselves of the geography. And when it comes to Greenland, that geography is more complicated than you might expect. Greenland is one of the hardest places in the world to show on a map where it really is. That's Jay Forman, one half of the YouTube duo Map Men and co-author of the book This Way Up when maps go wrong. If you look up Greenland on a standard map of the world, as almost all the statesmen and women of the world would have done this week, Greenland seems to be blunt. Absolutely massive. Bigger than South America, bigger than China, bigger even than the entire continent of Africa. It also appears to sit conveniently close to the east coast of the United States and much further away from Denmark. But it turns out that this is all a bit of an illusion. So why? Jay Forman. It's very, very far north and the map that we're mostly used to looking at is a flat map of the round world. And what that means is you have to distort the world and you have to do either squashing, stretching or slicing to make it work. And Greenland is a victim of this because Greenland being so close to the top, Greenland being so far north means that it usually has to be massively stretched. And it changes not only where it appears in relation to other places, it also changes the size. Yes, when you project a spherical world onto a rectangle, this spells trouble. And the person who got us into this particular trouble is everyone's favourite 16th century Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Makeda. The standard flat rectangular map of the world that almost everyone uses was invented by him, and it's known as the Makeda Projection. As Jay explains, on the Makeda Projection, the further towards the poles you go, the more things get stretched and this produces some enormous distortions. First, Greenland looks much closer to America than to Denmark, but it isn't. It's easy to get mixed up when you're looking at a flat map, but if you look at Google Earth and then measure it from looking at the North Pole down, Greenland is 1,200 miles from the nearest US coast, which is Maine, and it's 1,300 miles from the nearest Danish coast, so ever so slightly further but not a lot in it. And it's also, interestingly, it's 1,300 miles from Alaska, which intuitively doesn't feel right at all when you look at a flat map, but if you look from the North Pole looking down, you can see that Greenland is in the centre of everything and roughly equidistant from Alaska, Maine and Denmark. Are Denmark and US the closest countries to Greenland? Presumably Canada must be closer. No, closer to Greenland is Canada, which it's very close to, and Iceland is also just around the corner, and it's interesting that Iceland and Greenland, if you just look at the colours they are on the map, they seem to have been named the wrong way round. So distances are distorted, but the most obvious map distortion is how it changes sizes. For instance, look at how Greenland and Africa compare. On the Maketa projection, Greenland and Africa look more or less the same size, but in real life, Africa is 14 times bigger than Greenland. So Greenland is enormous, it's the largest island in the world, depending on what you class as an island instead of a continent, so it's enormous, but you could fit it into Africa 14 times. And comparing Greenland, for example, to the world's most populous country, India, looks vastly bigger on the Maketa projection, what about in reality? In reality, or on the globe, Greenland is about half the size of India, and they're a slightly similar shape as well. They're sort of triangles with a pointy bit at the bottom, so it's easy to compare the size when you look on a globe, but of course when you look on the famous flat Maketa projection map, it looks far too big. Interesting. So are you saying that we might be able to avoid a geopolitical crisis by just looking less at flat maps and looking a little bit more at globes? There is a popular theory that the reason Donald Trump is so keen on Greenland is because he's been looking at the Maketa projection and it looks like by acquiring Greenland, he would enormously increase the size of the USA. And I wonder if just showing him a globe might make him rethink just how valuable it is. Although the other problem is that by looking at a globe, you can see much more accurately than on a Maketa projection exactly why it's such a strategic position, because it's sort of in the centre of the world in a way, by looking down, it's very close to Alaska and the north of Russia and Scandinavia and Iceland and the coast of Canada, which is something you don't really get to appreciate if you look at a traditional flat map. Yes, I can see why the Donald Trump needs to look at a globe theory has caught on on social media, but I strongly suspect that at some stage, somebody has shown Donald Trump a globe and doesn't necessarily change his views on things. So you've mentioned the Maketa projection. This is the most famous effort to project a sphere onto a flat surface. Why is it so bad? Surely there must be a better way to do it. There's lots of different ways of doing it. So the problem is, no matter how you decide to interpret a round world onto a flat map, you have to have some kind of distortion. Dissolution has to be sacrificed. You either have to squash bits or stretch bits or slice bits and every projection has a different compromise. One of the most famous ones is the Gulpita projection, which has accuracy for area size, but it's very inaccurate for shape so it makes Africa look twice as long as it is wide. But the much more famous one is the Maketa projection, where even though the area sizes are all massively distorted, the shapes are accurate. And this, it turns out, when people were sailing around the world hundreds of years ago, was incredibly useful. And the Maketa projection was developed to make it easier to sail from one place to another so that roughly a straight line on the sea is the same as a straight line on a map or a curved rum line, they used to call it. So interesting. So Maketa didn't particularly care about making everything the right shape. He was trying to solve a navigational problem and it just so happens that this property of a straight line on the map is a straight line in reality. That preserves the shapes but not the sizes. That's right. So Greenland, or at least the southern portion of Greenland that's not been stretched quite so much, looks like it's the right kind of shape and the angles are all accurate, but the area has been massively distorted. And do you have sympathy with Maketa or do you think there's an obvious better way to do things? Well, it doesn't matter which method you choose. There's going to be a compromise of some sort. And Maketa, his job wasn't to try and make the colonial powers of Northern Europe look bigger than they were. That was just a nice little side effect for Northern Europe. But the reason that it looks like it does is because that was genuinely useful for navigation. But what it means is, depending on the method you use, because there are different types of Maketa projections, and there is a version where the North Pole stretches infinitely forever, because no matter how much you try to unfold the fine point that is the North Pole, if you try and stretch it to fill a map, you could actually have it go up and up forever. So you can see why it might be appealing to get your hands on Greenland if it looks like it's an infinitely large property. Ah, thanks to Jay Forman, one half of YouTube sensation MapMend and the co-author of the book This Way Up When Maps Go Wrong. If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch at more or less at bbc.co.uk. We'll be back next time. And until then, goodbye.
