<P> The Mercator projection is a cylindrical map projection presented by the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 . It became the standard map projection for nautical purposes because of its ability to represent lines of constant course, known as rhumb lines or loxodromes, as straight segments that conserve the angles with the meridians . Although the linear scale is equal in all directions around any point, thus preserving the angles and the shapes of small objects (which makes the projection conformal), the Mercator projection distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the Equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite . So, for example, landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than they actually are relative to land masses near the equator, such as Central Africa . </P> <P> Mercator's 1569 edition was a large planisphere measuring 202 by 124 cm, printed in eighteen separate sheets . As in all cylindrical projections, parallels and meridians are straight and perpendicular to each other . In accomplishing this, the unavoidable east - west stretching of the map, which increases as distance away from the equator increases, is accompanied in the Mercator projection by a corresponding north - south stretching, so that at every point location the east - west scale is the same as the north - south scale, making the projection conformal . Being a conformal projection, angles are preserved around all locations . </P>

A mercator map is constructed by projecting the grid of the globe onto a(n)
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