Fuller Projection

A New View for the New Millennium...A powerful tool for advancing humanity's option for success...

The projection used for this world map, also known as the "Dymaxion Map," was created by Buckminster Fuller, distinguished mathematician, inventor and 20th century visionary. The map began as a sketch,
"The One-Town World" in 1927. "By 1954, after working on the map for several decades," Fuller finally had a "satisfactory deck plan of the six and one half sextillion tons Spaceship Earth."

The Dymaxion Map is the only flat map of the entire surface of the earth that reveals our planet as it really is an island in one ocean without any visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas, and without splitting any continents.

Traditional world maps reinforce the elements that separate humanity and fail to highlight the patterns and relationships emerging from the ever evolving and accelerating process of globalization. Instead of serving as "a precise means for seeing the world from the dynamic, cosmic and comprehensive viewpoint," the maps we use still cause humanity to "appear inherently disassociated, remote, self-interestedly preoccupied with the political concept of its got to be you or me; there is not enough for both."

All flat world map representations of the spherical globe contain some amount of distortion either in shape, area, distance or direction measurements. On the well-known Mercator world map, Greenland appears to be three times its relative globe size and Antarctica appears as a long thin white strip along the bottom edge of the map. Even the popular Robinson Projection, now used in many schools, still contains a large amount of area distortion with Greenland appearing 60 percent larger than its relative globe size.

The map projection used for this map, also know as the "Dymaxion Map," was created by R. Buckminster Fuller, distinguished mathematician, inventor and 20th century visionary. It is the only flat map of the entire surface of the Earth which reveals our planet as one island in one ocean, without any visually obvious distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas, and without splitting any continents.

Fuller's view was that given a way to visualize the whole planet with greater accuracy, we humans will be better equipped to address challenges as we face our common future aboard Spaceship Earth.

The word Dymaxion, Spaceship Earth and the Fuller Projection design are trademarks of the Buckminster Fuller Institute. All rights reserved. Reversing the Transformation: drawing courtesy Pat Chipman.
Dymaxion = Dynamic + Maximum + Tension.

Special thanks to Chris Rywalt for developing this animation.

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Satellite Self-portrait

This remarkable cloud-free view of the Earth was produced by assembling hundreds of individual images acquired from the NOAA weather satellites which orbit the Earth at an altitude of 820 kms (520 miles). The ocean color is provided from a NASA sea surface temperature model derived from the same satellite data.

Once the basic satellite image mosaic was completed, shaded-relief enhancement was added to the land areas and ocean floor using USGS digital elevation data, highlighting the Earth's three-dimensional topography.

Scale approximately 1:43,520,000 (at the Equator) / 1 inch = 686 miles 1 cm = 435 kilometers

© 2002 Buckminster Fuller Institute and Jim Knighton. Coordinate transformation software written by Robert
W. Gray and modified by Jim Knighton. All rights reserved.

See also:
Explanation of the Fuller Projection Map in .pdf
Click here to purchase a copy of this map from our on-line store
Click here to view all available maps from our on-line store
Test your skills on this map puzzle made by Susanne Schuricht of Berlin, Germany
Try this map puzzle done in Flash by Adam Somlai-Fischer.
* For more information on The Fuller Projection or the work of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, contact us.