World Maps

The Albers Equal Area Projection§ was first introduced by Heinrich Christian Albers of Lunebürg, Germany in 1805. It is a conic projection in which the distance between parallels is computed so that the scale east to west is the reciprocal of the scale north to south. Meridians are equally spaced radii of circles, parallels are unequally spaced arcs of those circles, and the poles are likewise represented as arcs.

On the map shown here, the standard parallels of 30ºS and 60ºS are chosen to optimize the presentation of the Southern Hemisphere, emphasizing the fact that the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, vast as they are, are yet merely lobes of one great World Ocean.

Projected inside AutoCAD® by Ptolemytm map projection software by W. Murray Sexton, from the Micro World Database, available from the Central Intelligence Agency.

§John P. Snyder, Map Projections--A Working Manual, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1395, United States Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1987, pp. 98-103..

Albers Equal Area Conic

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If you don’t have Whip! you can still see the JPGs, but to fully appreciate these engineering-quality maps, download and install the free Whip! viewer plug-in (3.5MB). You will then be able to see the scalable vector versions of select maps.

Click on the Vector Map link on each page to view the DWF file. You can pan around and zoom in on them, because they are true scaleable vector drawings. Using the Right Click menu, you can even turn layers on and off individually.

The extreme precision and detail of these maps cannot be reproduced in raster formats. The world maps are designed to be plotted at sizes up to 24” by 36” by robotic pen plotter. Some of the oil and gas maps were designed to be viewed up close when plotted at 300 dpi, at sizes up to 3 feet by 10 feet. The size of a BMP file of that scale would be approximately 1.5 gigabytes.

If you don’t have Whip! you can still see the JPGs, but to fully appreciate these engineering-quality maps, download and install the free Whip! viewer plug-in (3.5MB). You will then be able to see the scalable vector versions of select maps.

Click on the Vector Map link on each page to view the DWF file. You can pan around and zoom in on them, because they are true scaleable vector drawings. Using the Right Click menu, you can even turn layers on and off individually.

If you have limited bandwidth, be aware that the DWF files contained in this site range from about 100KB to about 750KB.