Farewell Web Mercator

Pirmin Kalberer @implgeo

State of the Map Europe 2024 Łódź

About me

Lazy mapper (55 changesets in 15 years)

FOSSGIS e.V. board (German OSM chapter)

GIS developer

  • Sourcepole, Switzerland
  • t-rex tile server -> BBOX

Web Mercator - the bad parts

Size distortion

Africa actually has 14 times as much area as Greenland

Thematic mapping

In the wild

Mercator projection

  • Gerardus Mercator, 1596
  • Conformal cylindrical map projection
  • Good for navigation

Web Mercator

  • Mercator projection cropped to ~85°N to 85°S -> square, good for tiling
  • Spherical and ellipsoidal mix of formulas

Alternatives

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1572

Equal Earth map projection

Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson, Bernhard Jenny, 2018

https://www.equal-earth.com/

Equal Earth Greenwich

EPSG:8857

Equal Earth Americas

EPSG:8858

Equal Earth Asia-Pacific

EPSG:8859

Equal Earth Florence

Florence Meridian 11E

Support

  • PROJ -> GDAL, QGIS, R
  • D3, Plotly
  • proj4js

Web mapping

Equal Earth already in use by cartographers

Limitations:

  • Limited zooming
  • Static center meridian
  • Tile caching

Tile grid

Scaled grid

MapLibre

https://equal.bbox.earth/maplibre/

Web Mercator grid

OpenLayers

https://equal.bbox.earth/ol-asia-pacific/

Equal Earth Asia-Pacific, Web Mercator grid

DeckGL

https://equal.bbox.earth/deckgl/

MapLibre map with DeckGL layer using Web Mercator tile grid.

Proposal: Combined projections

https://equal.bbox.earth/maplibre-eq2merc/

Equal Earth tiles at z0-z2 and Web Mercator tiles with z >= 3.

OSM basemap with combined projections

https://maps.bbox.earth/

MapLibre with Shortbread PMTiles.

Possible improvements

Animated transition z2 -> z3

https://kvaleya.gitlab.io/maplibre/globe/globedemo.html

Dynamic center meridian

https://observablehq.com/d/ece4d307c72c1312

Reproject WGS-84-Tiles?

Coordinate transformation

Plugins for MapLibre, OpenLayers, etc. with coordinate transformation functions.

Adapted zoom functions between z < 3 and z >= 3.

Summary

Say farewell to Web Mercator

(on world scale)

and use Equal Earth instead.

Thank you

Pirmin Kalberer

https://mapstodon.space/@implgeo

equal.bbox.earth