About Globe Unfold

One planet, different projections

Globe Unfold is an interactive geography explorer. A 3D globe and a flat world map share the same geographic data. The green highlight shows the surface visible from your current globe viewpoint, so you can see how a curved surface changes when projected onto a flat map.

Explore the maps

• Drag the globe, or focus it and use the arrow keys, to move the viewpoint and highlight. Use the mouse wheel or plus and minus controls to change the globe distance.
• Drag the flat map to rotate Earth inside a fixed projection frame. The highlight stays in place while the continents move and the globe follows. The sphere is rotated and projected again, so dragging repeatedly does not expose empty strips. Turn on “Move highlight” below the maps to hold the continents fixed and drag the highlight instead; the globe follows the selected viewpoint.
• Click a location on the flat map to move the highlight and center the globe there. Switch projections to compare the same view in Mercator and Equal Earth.
• Use the region presets, layer controls and reset button to explore specific areas. The map interface supports 40 languages, each with a shareable URL. Changing the language updates the URL while preserving the current map view.

Mercator: useful angles, distorted areas

Mercator preserves local angles. In the usual geographic orientation, its scale grows toward the poles: at 60° latitude, the linear scale is twice the equatorial scale and the area scale is four times as large. The mathematical poles cannot be shown at a finite distance, so this explorer clips Mercator at approximately ±85.05° in projection coordinates. After you rotate the flat map, those coordinates rotate too; the geographic poles may move into view.

Equal Earth: comparable areas

Equal Earth preserves relative areas, making it useful for comparing the sizes of countries and continents. It includes both poles in a finite outline. Shapes, distances and local angles can still be distorted; preserving area does not make every property accurate.

Sources and limits

The map uses public-domain Natural Earth data at 1:110 million scale, distributed through world-atlas. Projection and clipping use D3 geo. The globe uses Three.js, with an interactive orthographic fallback when WebGL is unavailable.

This is a generalized educational map. Coastlines and borders are simplified, and it is not intended for navigation, surveying or adjudicating territorial claims. The initial viewpoint is estimated from IP address and can be inaccurate. See the privacy notice for how that request works.