Look at a map on your classroom wall. Does Greenland look almost as big as Africa? In reality, Africa is fourteen times larger. The reason for this distortion goes back to a mapmaker named Gerardus Mercator, born March 5, 1512, in what is now Belgium. Mercator faced a problem that every mapmaker faces: Earth is a sphere, but maps are flat. Imagine peeling an orange and trying to flatten the peel on a table. It tears and gaps appear. A map projection is a way of stretching and squishing the globe's surface to make it fit on a flat page. Mercator's projection, created in 1569, stretches the areas near the North and South Poles to keep the shapes of continents accurate. This was incredibly useful for sailors. On a Mercator map, a straight line between two points shows the exact compass direction to follow. Before this, navigating across open ocean required constant adjustments. The trade-off is that land near the poles looks much larger than it really is. Greenland appears enormous. Antarctica looks like it wraps around the entire bottom of the map. Countries near the equator, where the stretching is smallest, appear at close to their real size. The Mercator projection was never meant to show the true size of countries. It was designed to help ships cross oceans safely.