When is the robinson projection used

Statistics for Robinson projection Look-up Popularity. Style: MLA. Get Word of the Day daily email! Test Your Vocabulary. Test your visual vocabulary with our question challenge! Love words? Need even more definitions? Just between us: it's complicated. Ask the Editors 'Everyday' vs. What Is 'Semantic Bleaching'? When you look at the continents on the Robinson projection, then the boundaries of each one looks consistent in aspect to what they are in real life.

The only issue from a visualization standpoint involves the compression of landmasses near the poles and along the edge of each side. That means New Zealand features a challenging placement in the lower right-hand quadrant of the map, but the placement of Africa, Asia, and the other major continents is quite accurate.

Robinson even created the major bodies of water for each continent to be on display with his projection. The visualization of the projection works well at any scale. When you create large versions of a Robinson projection, then the consistency of the visualization is the same as it is for smaller maps.

Because the curvature and distortion are less extreme in the central part of the map, you receive a similar result at any size. This advantage is particularly useful from an educational standpoint because it can get printed in a book the same way it looks when on display at the front of a classroom.

Country borders are easily placed on the Robinson projection. The Robinson projection is useful from a topography standpoint and from a nation-recognition instructional view. Additional lines in the ocean can indicate the presence of island nations, even if they are difficult to see on small representations. That means everything is truer to size, even if there are some distortions along the south pole that make Antarctica seem much bigger than its actual size. It is a projection that has wide availability.

After National Geographic began using the Robinson projection for their global map needs, its use began to take off in classrooms around the world. It eliminates the visualization issues that come with the flat Mercator perspective that was first created in for navigation purposes. It also eliminates the duplication along the edges were Alaska appears in both sections, as well as a small part of Russia. Distortions exist on the edges of the map. Although publications had problems with the amount of distortion that occurs at the poles of the Robinson projection, there are also issues to consider at the edge of the map.

The meridians curve gently with this design, avoiding extremes, but stretching the ends into long lines instead of leaving them as points of reference. It served the needs of Rand McNally at the time, even if it grew out of favor by the turn of the century. It offers limited benefits for navigation. The primary purpose of the Robinson projection is to create a visually appealing map of the entire world.

Because it is a compromise visualization, it does not eliminate every type of distortion. The goal is to keep the levels of all distortions relatively low over the majority of the map. However, distortions near the outer parallels at high latitudes are common on most pseudo-cylindrical map projections.

The distortions become less objectionable moving away from the poles. The projection also distorts distance, area, shapes, and direction. Area changes with latitude and not longitude , with severe exaggerations at high latitudes.