xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

This is the ninth comic in the Bad Map Projections series displaying Bad Map Projection #194: Interrupted Spheres. It follows 2999: Bad Map Projection: The United Stralia, released nine and a half months prior.

There is no perfect way to draw a map of the world on a flat piece of paper. Each one will introduce a different type of distortion, and the best projection for a given situation is sometimes disputed. As was mentioned in 977: Map Projections, a wisecrack to this dilemma is to use a globe - which maps the world onto a sphere, thus minimizing distortion by using roughly the same shape as the world itself. This "map projection" goes a step past the wisecrack and proceeds straight into absurdity, by projecting each continent onto a sphere. This bends entirely too far in the other direction to the dilemma; whereas a typical map projection adds distortion by trying to show the (curved) planet on a flat surface, this "map projection" adds distortion by showing the (relatively flat) continents on a much more sharply-curved sphere than the planet they are actually part of.

The title text refers to land bridges, narrow bits of land between larger landmasses. When glaciers covered much of the Earth, the water locked up in the glaciers meant that sea levels were lower, as well as the overlying icepacks being higher, and things like the Bering land bridge spanned areas between continents that are currently ocean. Randall suggests that these formed connections in the gaps between the spheres. This implies the absurd idea that the projection reflects an underlying reality where the continents actually exist on separate spheres, rather than this simply being an attempt at a "better" way to display Earth's landmasses. In this situation the land of the 'bridges' would reach like spires, vertically upwards from the surface of each sphere, until they descend down onto their counterpart neighbouring sphere.