Wikipedia
The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians. Although the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal), the Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite. So, for example, landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than they actually are relative to land masses near the equator, such as Central Africa.
Usage examples of "mercator projection".
Resolutely, he closed the door and strode over to the Mercator projection, fumbling to extract a red marker from his pocket.
She skewed herself around and saw the big map that Aivas had called a Mercator projection.
A Mercator projection was a type of map that made the world look squashed flat on a piece of paper.
Once behind the desk, it smoothed the Mercator projection out, holding the map down with objects on its desk, and then unrolled the rest of the hard copy.
It involved a Mercator projection of the planet Earth-a common, rectangular, classroom wall map-but with the equator drawn to one-to-one scale.
She saw that one wall of the room was entirely composed of a clear plastic sheet on which had been etched a detailed Mercator projection map of the earth.
Then something only vaguely like a human face filled the screens, its features stretched across asymmetrical expanses of bone like some obscene Mercator projection.
It involved a Mercator projection of the planet Earth -- a common, rectangular, classroom wall map -- but with the equator drawn to one-to-one scale.
It was a Mercator projection, of the surface of a world, pock-marked by craters.