Russell McLendon is a science writer with expertise in the natural environment, humans, and wildlife. He holds degrees in journalism and environmental anthropology. Like all planets, Earth isn't flat.

Cartographers rely on the authority of maps to communicate locations, guide navigation at sea, and shape people’s perceptions ...

Think back to your childhood at the beach or playing in a sandbox and you likely wondered "What if I kept digging through the entire world, where would I end up?" I recall as a kid my dad telling me ...

A World Map With No National Borders and 1,642 Animals A self-taught artist-cartographer and outdoorsman spent three years on an obsessive labor of love with few parallels. By Natasha Frost Reporting ...

Have you ever tried smashing a ball into a flat rectangle? When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Walk into any school classroom and you ...

Map making has been around for as long as there have been explorers. For more accurate maps and the safety of explorers, a coordinate system was first proposed by the Greek astronomer, Hipparchus ...

Ever since we discovered Earth was round, mapmakers have struggled to create a map that accurately shows our planet in 2D. Most notably, Africa always ends up appearing far smaller than it actually is ...

The African Union endorsed a map that reflects the truer relative size of the continent. (map public domain via Equal Earth) The African Union, an intergovernmental organization of 55 African ...

When Christopher Columbus first set foot in what's now the Bahamas, it was the lucky sum of a 1,400-year-old cartographical error and Columbus's own miscalculations ...