Plate Carrée
Plate Carrée looks almost trivial: latitude and longitude form an even grid. That simplicity makes it technically convenient, but as a world map it can strongly distort shapes and distances.
The world's simplest grid and its hidden price
In Plate Carrée, every degree of longitude and latitude receives the same amount of screen space. For a computer, that is convenient: raster data, globe textures, and simple coordinates can be stored easily. That is why this layout often appears underneath GIS systems and visualizations.
The problem begins when we treat this technical grid as a natural world map. Real meridians converge toward the poles, but here they remain parallel. As a result, high latitudes are stretched horizontally and countries far from the equator lose natural proportions.
Global Cartographic Grid
Distortion Properties
| Property | Characteristic |
|---|---|
| Area | ❌DistortedHighly distorted (horizontal stretching near the poles) |
| Shape | ❌DistortedHighly distorted (horizontal stretching near the poles) |
| Distances | ✅PreservedPreserved along all meridians and the equator |
| Angles & Directions | ❌DistortedDistorted |
| Continuity | ✅PreservedPreserved |
History & Origin
One of the oldest known projections, credited to Marinus of Tyre around 120 AD. The French name 'Plate Carrée' translates to 'flat square', as lines of latitude and longitude form a simple square grid.
Applications
Geographic Information Systems (GIS), raster data storage (where pixels map directly to coordinates), and simple computerized computer graphics.
How to read this map
It is less a beautiful map than a coordinate table drawn as an image. Excellent for storing data, suspicious for building intuition.
- The equator is the most natural part because longitude degrees are widest there.
- The closer to the pole, the stronger the horizontal stretching.
- A simple grid does not mean a simple picture of reality.
- It works well as a data format, less well as an educational map.
What you gain and lose
Plate Carrée preserves coordinate simplicity at the cost of shape, scale, and distance. It is technically practical, but visually misleading.
Globe textures, GIS data, simple raster storage, and coordinates.
Wall maps, country comparisons, and presentations of world proportions.
✦ How do different countries look in this projection?
Analyze shape distortions of 5 countries in this cartographic projection and test them in the sandbox.
Russia shows strong horizontal stretching in the north.
Test on map →
Canada reveals the false width of high latitudes.
Test on map →
Brazil near the equator looks calmer.
Test on map →
Australia shows moderate southern hemisphere errors.
Test on map →
Greenland becomes an extremely stretched warning sign.
Test on map →Facts worth remembering
- It is one of the oldest and simplest world projections.
- The name Plate Carrée means a flat square grid.
- Many globe textures begin life in this simple layout.
Keep reading about maps that reshape intuition
Frequently Asked Questions
It is used in computer science, databases, and GIS systems. Since coordinates correspond directly to pixel locations (X=longitude, Y=latitude), it simplifies raster data storage.
It must not be used for navigation or educational classroom wall maps, due to extreme scale distortion in higher latitudes.
Polar countries. Antarctica is stretched into a massive rectangle at the bottom of the map, and Greenland is heavily flattened and pulled wide.
Equatorial countries (e.g., Kenya, Colombia, Congo, or Indonesia) where the degree grid matches the sphere surface with minimal warp.
Because it is extremely simple to program. The X axis maps directly to longitude, and the Y axis maps directly to latitude, requiring no complex trigonometric calculations.