> WHAT_THIS_MAP_IS

This is the azimuthal equidistant projection: the round Earth mathematically unrolled onto a flat disc centered on the North Pole. It is a real, rigorously defined map used in polar navigation and on the United Nations emblem, and it is the image most flat-Earth maps are copied from. Every data point on it is plotted with exact projection math from true latitude and longitude. Distances from the pole are exact; shapes and distances stretch toward the rim, which is why Antarctica smears into a ring: that ring is a projection artifact, not an ice wall.

> WHAT_THE_RESEARCH_SAYS

The academic record is clear. Scholars have known Earth is spherical since antiquity: Eratosthenes measured its circumference around 240 BC to within a few percent. Historians such as Jeffrey Burton Russell (Inventing the Flat Earth, 1991) document that the idea of a medieval flat-Earth belief is a 19th-century myth. Modern flat-Earth models make testable predictions that fail: they cannot reproduce time zones, southern-hemisphere flight times, lunar eclipse geometry, or satellite motion. This very site is a live experiment: the satellite tracker computes positions with SGP4 orbital mechanics around a spherical Earth, and the ISS telemetry matches it second by second. Those numbers only work on a globe.

projection: azimuthal equidistant (EPSG:104031 family) · coastlines: Natural Earth · references: Russell 1991, Cleomedes on Eratosthenes, NOAA geodesy