Keep North Up

Every now and then I come across a world map with the southern hemisphere on top. The point of such a map is not to increase functionality and/or readability, but rather to point out a “Eurasian bias” of some sort. Perhaps this approach has been a novel way to get some people to think a bit, but such maps contribute little more than this novelty. The most popular method of drawing a map is done because 1) most of the people are in the northern hemisphere, and 2) most of the land is in the northern hemisphere. One of these factors is human-dependent and the other is terrestrial-dependent. And since maps are generated for terrestrial creatures (and not aquatic life), putting the southern hemisphere on top only serves to make map reading more difficult.

(I have to admit that it is fun to look at the “bottom up” geography of the Earth, but the experience is almost always compromised because political boundaries are also drawn.)