World Maps Online

World Maps Online Map specialty retailer based in Seattle. Offering a vast range of wall maps, map murals, and education

09/05/2026

The UN didn’t ban the Mercator map.
On September 4 the General Assembly passed a resolution called Correct the Map. It’s non-binding. It bans nothing. It names no replacement.

What it actually asks: use equal-area projections when relative size matters, and teach students that different projections are built for different jobs. The minister who introduced it held up Equal Earth as an example and then said plainly, this isn’t a vote for one map, it’s a vote for a type of map.

164 countries said yes. Six abstained. One voted no.

The country that voted no never argued the map was accurate. It argued about the language in the text. Both sides agreed completely on the premise: a map is not neutral. A map is an argument about what matters.

There is no neutral map. Only a map that’s honest about what it gave up.

09/02/2026

I opened an incognito window. No account, no search history. I typed "lake ontario," and Google returned an AI summary about Lake America. Not a glitch.

An executive order on Aug 27 renamed the lake. The federal Geographic Names Information System updated on Aug 30. Google Maps follows that database, so it flipped, but only for users in the United States. On the Canadian side of the same water, it still reads Lake Ontario.

Same lake. Two maps. Depends where you're standing.

Ontario's premier answered it with a twenty-four-foot sign on the shoreline near Hamilton: "Lake Ontario. Now and Always." In English and French.

The name is older than either country. Canada's prime minister pointed out it comes from a Wendat word meaning the lake is big, the lake is beautiful. And its been on on maps for four hundred years.

08/19/2026

There's a spot in the South Pacific that is farther from land than
anywhere else on Earth, 1,670 miles of open ocean in every direction.
Since 1971, we've been deliberately aiming dead spacecraft at it.

More than 260 of them are on the seafloor there now: old satellites,
cargo ships, six Soviet Salyut stations, and the Mir space station,
which came down in 2001 trailing a fire trail visible from Fiji. The
International Space Station joins them in 2030.

The circle of empty ocean around Point Nemo, the zone with no human
beings in it at all, covers about 8.8 million square miles. That's a
bigger empty space than Russia. And when the ISS passes overhead at
250 miles up, the astronauts aboard are closer to that patch of water
than anyone standing on dry land.

Point Nemo sits at 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W. The three nearest pieces of
land all tie at 1,670 miles: Ducie Island in the Pitcairns, Motu Nui
next to Easter Island, and Maher Island off Antarctica. All three are
uninhabited.

A NOTE ON LOVECRAFT
H.P. Lovecraft published "The Call of Cthulhu" in 1928 and gave his
sunken city of R'lyeh the coordinates 47°9′S 126°43′W — roughly 200
miles from a point nobody would calculate until 1992. Whether that was
research or coincidence has been argued over for decades.

I'm Paul. I've been working with and selling maps since 1999, out of a
workshop in Seattle. Our small but mighty team specializes in wall maps, map murals, and vintage map reproductions

08/07/2026

How many Oceans actually exist??
(Hint: It's not the '7 seas!')

Let's explore the intriguing question of how many oceans exist, noting the varying numbers presented on different world maps. Some feel there is one global ocean while other models count oceans ranging from 4-7. Despite the same Earth and water, labels differ. We'll get into the definitions of 'sea' and 'ocean', using examples like the Caribbean Sea to clarify the distinctions. Learn about the different perspectives on our planet's bodies of water and some interesting ocean facts.

08/06/2026

In the 1500s, maps were incredibly expensive for sailors, often costing as much as their entire ship. We dive into the fascinating history of map making, explaining how hand-drawn manuscripts made maps a luxury afforded by only the most wealthy individuals. These interesting facts shed light on the challenges faced by early navigators and the value placed on cartography. An accurate map was a 'live or not' situation for setting out on the open waters, and only the wealthiest people had access to 'accurate' data and maps.

See our full length video on YouTube for more on the subject!

08/05/2026

In 1952, Marie Tharp discovered the largest geological feature on Earth, a 10,000-mile mountain range running down the middle of the Atlantic. Her boss told her to redo the calculations and called it "girl talk."
She redid them. The mountains were still there.
Tharp mapped 70% of the planet from a basement lab at Columbia, using sonar readings, a ruler, and India ink. Her work became the evidence for plate tectonics. Oh, and she wasn't allowed on the research ships until 20 years into the project.

08/04/2026

Africa is a massive continent but how massive depends entirely on which map you’re looking at. Let me show you the same continent on 5 different map projections & compare them side by side to world globes.

The United States, China, and India could all fit inside Africa at the same time. But on most world maps, Africa doesn’t look nearly that big. That’s because the Mercator projection, the most commonly referenced world map of all, compresses Africa while stretching areas near the poles.

But Mercator isn’t the only option. Watch to see how Africa appears on five different map projections: Mercator, Gall-Peters, Equal Earth, Winkel Tripel, and Robinson. Each one makes different choices about what to preserve (shapes, area, distance) and what to sacrifice.

Once you see how dramatically different the same continent can look, you’ll never look at a world map the same way again.

If you're interested in reference grade wall maps, please check out our website for a huge variety of maps!

08/03/2026

Every flat map of the Earth is wrong. Not a little wrong, but mathematically, unavoidably wrong. You can’t flatten a sphere without breaking something, and mapmakers have been trying to solve this for over 500 years. Nobody’s cracked it.

Let's break down why every world map has to lie to you, what the different projections sacrifice, and what I actually look for in maps now, after 25 years of printing them.

07/31/2026

Draw a circle over Southeast Asia and you'll find more people live inside it than in the entire rest of the world combined. Over half of everyone alive on Earth. Even stranger: close to a third of that circle is open ocean, and a huge stretch of the land is high desert and the Tibetan Plateau. It still holds half of us.

First mapped by Ken Myers in 2013, then refined by economist Danny Quah down to an even smaller circle centered on the tiny township of Mong Khet, Myanmar.

07/30/2026

In 1952, Marie Tharp discovered a 10,000-mile mountain range at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. When she showed her supervisor, he told her to redo her calculations. Called it “girl talk.”

Turned out she was right. And her discovery changed everything we know about how the Earth works.

This is the story of how one woman mapped 70% of the planet from a basement lab, hardly allowed to set foot on the research ships that collected her data.

Marie Tharp turned sonar readings into the first accurate maps of the ocean floor, revealed the mid-ocean ridge system that circles the entire planet, and provided the evidence that proved continents move.

Before Tharp, scientists thought the ocean floor was flat and featureless. After Tharp, we understood plate tectonics.

IMAGES USED:
Photographs courtesy of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons

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