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Pull Request Overview
Adds a new blog post about Mercator’s 1569 world map, including interactive demos and high-resolution resources.
- Introduces a long-form article with front matter metadata (title, tags, description, published date).
- Embeds an interactive Seadragon viewer and a Greenland size demo via iframe/shortcode.
- Links to high-resolution imagery and external references.
Tip: Customize your code reviews with copilot-instructions.md. Create the file or learn how to get started.
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| Magnetic North is the North that a compass points to. It's basically just the average polarity of the iron atoms in Earth's mantle. Because Earth's mantle is a constantly-shifting sea of molten metal, the average polarity can change pretty quickly, even on a human timescale. This causes Magnetic North to move. In 2025, Magnetic North is pretty close to Geographic North, but in 1569 it was in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, hundreds of miles away from its current location. | ||
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The image path uses a '~/' prefix, which typically won’t resolve in static site builds and will result in a broken image. Use a valid site-relative or page-relative path (e.g., /images/north-magnetic-pole-travel.webp or north-magnetic-pole-travel.webp if using a page bundle) so the asset loads correctly.
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| The Americas are the most obviously wrong part here. Canada is enormous, the area that would eventually become the United States is squished, and South America is shaped kind of like a piece of toast. | ||
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| The reason the Americas are so hilariously misshapen is that nobody knew what they looked like at this point. This map was created barely a century after Christopher Columbus landed, so the vast majority of the New World was still unexplored to Europeans. Surveying unknown land is difficult, and it's even harder the land is a continent-sized rainforest with jaguars and venomous snakes. It's understandable that they didn't have a great idea of what South America looked like. |
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Grammar fix: add 'when' to read more naturally.
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| The reason the Americas are so hilariously misshapen is that nobody knew what they looked like at this point. This map was created barely a century after Christopher Columbus landed, so the vast majority of the New World was still unexplored to Europeans. Surveying unknown land is difficult, and it's even harder the land is a continent-sized rainforest with jaguars and venomous snakes. It's understandable that they didn't have a great idea of what South America looked like. | |
| The reason the Americas are so hilariously misshapen is that when nobody knew what they looked like at this point. This map was created barely a century after Christopher Columbus landed, so the vast majority of the New World was still unexplored to Europeans. Surveying unknown land is difficult, and it's even harder the land is a continent-sized rainforest with jaguars and venomous snakes. It's understandable that they didn't have a great idea of what South America looked like. |
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| They sketched a coastline based on what it looked like in their imaginations, then told everyone that there was a lush, forested mega-continent below South America. | ||
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| I take it back. Leaving out a continent isn't the worst map-making mistake; including a made-up a continent is even worse. |
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Remove the extra article 'a'.
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| I take it back. Leaving out a continent isn't the worst map-making mistake; including a made-up a continent is even worse. | |
| I take it back. Leaving out a continent isn't the worst map-making mistake; including a made-up continent is even worse. |
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| In the modern day, it's trivial to figure out exactly which direction Geographic North is by using your phone, but that's only because your phone can interface with GPS and has built-in accelerometers and gyroscopes. When all you had is a compass, the only North that you knew how to find was Magnetic North. This means that most actually useful navigation maps set the 'up' direction as Magnetic North. Instead, Mercator's map was oriented to Geographic North. This alone made it basically useless for sailors of the time. |
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Tense agreement: 'had is' should be 'had was'.
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| In the modern day, it's trivial to figure out exactly which direction Geographic North is by using your phone, but that's only because your phone can interface with GPS and has built-in accelerometers and gyroscopes. When all you had is a compass, the only North that you knew how to find was Magnetic North. This means that most actually useful navigation maps set the 'up' direction as Magnetic North. Instead, Mercator's map was oriented to Geographic North. This alone made it basically useless for sailors of the time. | |
| In the modern day, it's trivial to figure out exactly which direction Geographic North is by using your phone, but that's only because your phone can interface with GPS and has built-in accelerometers and gyroscopes. When all you had was a compass, the only North that you knew how to find was Magnetic North. This means that most actually useful navigation maps set the 'up' direction as Magnetic North. Instead, Mercator's map was oriented to Geographic North. This alone made it basically useless for sailors of the time. |
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| But for a ship at sea, being able to plot a course in a few minutes and being able to keep that course by just following a certain direction on your compass was *invaluable*. Fewer steps in the plotting process means less room for error, and error in your plot means starving to death on the open ocean: not ideal. | ||
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| This why the Mercator Projection was so popular. To 16th-century sailors, it was literally life-saving. |
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Add 'is' for grammatical correctness.
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| This why the Mercator Projection was so popular. To 16th-century sailors, it was literally life-saving. | |
| This is why the Mercator Projection was so popular. To 16th-century sailors, it was literally life-saving. |
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| Gerardus Mercator is kind of a paradox. | ||
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| One the one hand, he was a brilliant mathematician who designed a map projection that revolutionized navigation and would be used for centuries to come. |
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Fix phrase to 'On the one hand'.
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| One the one hand, he was a brilliant mathematician who designed a map projection that revolutionized navigation and would be used for centuries to come. | |
| On the one hand, he was a brilliant mathematician who designed a map projection that revolutionized navigation and would be used for centuries to come. |
I hope this is the last one :/
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