Greenland and other polar regions appear far larger than they actually are, while equatorial landmasses such as Africa and South America are heavily compressed. This feature made the Mercator projection invaluable to mariners, who could use it to sail in straight lines with a constant compass bearing, but it also meant that the relative size of different landmasses was hugely distorted. With this in mind, he drew a world map with parallels of latitude that are spaced increasingly far apart as they move away from the equator. The Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator first designed the map style in 1569 as a way of displaying the spherical Earth on a flat, rectangular surface. Once a staple of school classrooms the world over, the famed Mercator projection has also been the subject of considerable debate and controversy.

Pratt.Mercator’s 1569 map-the first to employ his projection style. NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC and VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership. “Such extreme heat has direct impacts on human health, as well as having other consequences, including these fires that are occurring now in Europe and Africa, and which have been rampant over the past few years in North America,” Pawson said. High humidity and dewpoints, along with warm overnight temperatures, created potentially deadly conditions. The Shanghai Xujiahui Observatory, where records have been kept since 1873, recorded its highest temperature ever: 40.9 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 13, 2022. In China, the summer has brought three heatwaves that have buckled roads, melted tar, and popped off roof tiles. In Iran, temperatures remained high in July after reaching a scorching 52 degrees Celsius (126 degrees Fahrenheit) in late June. On July 13 in the capital city of Tunis, the temperature reached 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit), breaking a 40-year record. In North Africa, Tunisia has endured a heatwave and fires that have damaged the country's grain crop. In the U.K., the Met Office issued extreme heat or amber warnings as temperatures were expected to continue to climb, possibly breaking all-time highs. The avalanche of snow, ice, and rock killed 11 hikers. In Italy, the record heat contributed to the July 3 collapse of a portion of the Marmolada Glacier in the Dolomites. The prominent fire detections west of Madrid include the town of Las Hurdes where more than 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres) have burned. The above image shows the locations of fire detections in Portugal and Spain as observed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi NPP satellite on July 12, 2022. More than half of the country was on red alert as firefighters battled 14 active fires.

In Portugal, temperatures reached 45 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 13 in the town of Leiria, where more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) had burned. In Western Europe, which was already experiencing severe drought, the heatwave fueled fires that raged across Portugal, Spain, and parts of France. “While there is a clear pattern of an ‘atmospheric wave’ with alternating warm (redder) and cool (bluer) values in different locations, this large area of extreme (and record breaking) heat is another clear indicator that emissions of greenhouse gases by human activity are causing weather extremes that impact our living conditions,” said Steven Pawson, chief of the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. It was produced by combining observations with a version of the Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS) global model, which uses mathematical equations to represent physical processes in the atmosphere. The map above shows the surface air temperatures across most of the Eastern Hemisphere on July 13, 2022. In June and July 2022, heatwaves struck Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, as temperatures climbed above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in places and broke many long-standing records.

The world after 2012 map