Press Release — Mosaic-23 Xara
For immediate release · May 2026
A new world map projection from Catalonia challenges the way schools teach geography
Real Earth presents Mosaic-23 Xara, an original cartographic projection that displays the entire planet — Antarctica included — in a rectangular format with each continent shown at its real size. A personal, independent initiative offering an alternative to the distortions of Mercator and other traditional projections.
What it is
Mosaic-23 Xara is a world map composed of 23 pieces (6 main continents and 17 sub-regions). Unlike conventional maps — which apply a single mathematical transformation to the whole sphere — this proposal projects each piece from its own geographic centroid. The result: zero distortion within each continent, and a view of the world where Africa regains its real size (14 times larger than Greenland) and Antarctica appears as a continent in its own right, not as a strip at the bottom of the map.
What it brings
Compared to classic and contemporary projections, Mosaic-23 stands out for:
- Antarctica visible and to scale, neither stretched (Mercator) nor flattened (Gall-Peters).
- Continents with their real shape, without vertical stretching or horizontal distortion.
- Conventional rectangular format, immediately readable, with no interruptions or unfolding.
- America–Asia axis preserved, retaining the cognitive familiarity of most world maps.
- Division into recognizable geographic units (India, Arabia, Madagascar...), not arbitrary triangles or icosahedra as in other alternative proposals (AuthaGraph, Dymaxion).
A humanistic, not mathematical, proposal
"My goal was to square the circle: see the planet printed on a sheet of paper at real sizes. I started from the problems I noticed as a map user, not from prior teams of cartographers. The work has been laborious and largely manual — someone will surely refine it computationally. To me, it mattered to arrive there from a personal and pragmatic standpoint."
The author, Xara, is an independent practitioner who approached the project from scratch, without academic cartographic training, deliberately seeking new solutions before reviewing existing ones.
Availability
The resulting maps are published under CC BY-SA 4.0: free use for schools, textbooks, press, exhibitions, and any non-profit or educational project. Available at high resolution in several visual variants (Classic, Terra, Relief, Negative, and more) at realearth.cat.
What for
The author aims for Mosaic-23 to become a viable alternative to Mercator in classrooms, helping correct the distorted mental image that generations of students have inherited from a projection designed in 1569 for maritime navigation. The proposal is open to collaboration with educational publishers, schools, and cultural institutions.
About Real Earth — Independent personal initiative exploring and sharing new ways to represent the planet on 2D maps, free from political bias and faithful to geography. Web: realearth.cat.
Contact: contacte@realearth.cat
Other works by the author: xkno.cat
Visuals: high-resolution images available in the images/ folder of this press kit, free for editorial use with credit "Real Earth · Mosaic-23 Xara".