Why the World Looks Different from the North
If you grew up in Europe, you'll probably have a fairly fixed picture of the world in your head.
North America is on the left. Europe sits somewhere in the middle. Russia stretches off towards the right. Greenland is that enormous island tucked rather awkwardly towards the top.
Of course, that's not the world map. Maps centred on the Pacific are commonplace elsewhere, and there are even maps that turn the familiar north-up convention on its head.
Where you put the centre — and even which way is up — changes the way you see the world.
But for those of us accustomed to a European-centred world map, there's one particularly interesting blind spot.
The Arctic is always at the edge.
And that's not necessarily the best way to understand what's happening there.
Turn the world around and look down from the North Pole and something interesting happens.
Greenland is no longer perched at the edge of the map. Russia, Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia are no longer scattered across opposite sides. Instead, they gather around the same increasingly important ocean.
And suddenly quite a lot of today's news starts to make more sense.
Image - Strebe
Why is everyone suddenly talking about Greenland?
Donald Trump's continuing interest in American control of Greenland has brought the world's largest island rather abruptly into the geopolitical spotlight.
The obvious question is: why Greenland?
Look at it on a conventional world map and it can appear enormous but remote — somewhere between North America and Europe, but not obviously at the centre of anything.
Look at it from above the Arctic and the picture changes.
Greenland sits between North America, the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic, close to some of the shortest routes between Russia and the United States.
Its position has been strategically important for decades. The US already operates Pituffik Space Base in north-west Greenland, an important part of America's space and defence infrastructure.
Now there's another reason to look north.
The United States is developing Golden Dome, Donald Trump's proposed next-generation missile defence system, intended to protect the US against ballistic, hypersonic, cruise missile and other advanced aerial threats.
And the Greenland connection isn't simply speculation. In July 2026, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed that ongoing talks between the US, Greenland and Denmark included possible future investment connected with Golden Dome and the deployment of American forces in Greenland.
When potential threats to North America can approach across the polar region, Greenland's position starts to look considerably less remote.
And defence is only part of the story.
An ocean that's becoming increasingly important
The Arctic itself is changing.
As sea ice retreats, northern shipping routes are becoming increasingly accessible. They remain difficult, unpredictable and politically complicated — we're certainly not about to replace the Suez Canal with a shortcut across the North Pole — but their growing accessibility changes the strategic importance of the region.
Russia has an enormous Arctic coastline and substantial military capability in the region. China, despite not being an Arctic nation, has growing interests there. NATO, meanwhile, launched Arctic Sentry in 2026 to coordinate its increasing focus on the High North.
Greenland also has potentially significant mineral resources, just as access to critical minerals has become an increasingly important economic and security issue.
None of this means that the United States needs to own Greenland to defend itself. America already has military access there, and Greenland and Denmark have repeatedly rejected Trump's demands for US control.
But it does help explain why this enormous island has moved from the edge of the map to the centre of a much bigger geopolitical argument.
Or perhaps it was never really at the edge at all.
Maybe we've just been looking at it that way.
And this is where maps become interesting.
Every flat world map has to make choices. Something gets put in the centre and something gets pushed towards the edge. Change those choices and, without changing the geography at all, you can change what we notice.
Which brings us to Mr Peirce.
Enter Mr Peirce
Charles Sanders Peirce published his Peirce Quincuncial projection in 1879.
Calling him a cartographer, however, would be selling him rather short.
He was a mathematician, scientist, logician, philosopher, chemist and working geodesist. He helped establish pragmatism, became a hugely important figure in semiotics — the study of signs and meaning — and later developed a philosophy he called synechism, concerned with continuity and connectedness.
If you're struggling to keep up, so are we.
Peirce seems to have spent much of his life thinking about things the rest of us rarely find time to consider.
He studied logic from childhood and spent more than 30 years working for the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, making extraordinarily precise measurements of the Earth. In between, he somehow found time to think deeply about mathematics, science, probability, philosophy, meaning and the nature of knowledge itself.
And in 1879, he also found time to turn the world into a square.
His Peirce Quincuncial projection places the North Pole at its centre, with the Northern Hemisphere arranged around it and the Southern Hemisphere extending towards the edges and corners.
The result bears remarkably little resemblance to the world map many of us grew up with.
And that's precisely what makes it interesting.
Donald Trump and Mr Peirce
Donald Trump and Charles Sanders Peirce would make fairly unlikely dinner companions.
Yet, nearly 150 years apart, Greenland and the geography of the Arctic have somehow brought them to the same table.
When Peirce published his projection, he obviously wasn't trying to explain 21st-century geopolitics.
But look at his map today and the thing we've been discussing becomes remarkably clear. The Arctic is no longer something happening along the top edge of the world. It becomes the focus of the map.
From this perspective, Greenland's current strategic importance doesn't seem quite so surprising.
The politics haven't changed the geography.
The map has changed the way we see it.
A rather nice coincidence
There's one final Peirce idea worth indulging.
Later in his life he developed that philosophy called synechism — broadly speaking, an emphasis on continuity and connectedness in nature.
There's no evidence that Peirce designed his map to illustrate this philosophy. In fact, his work on synechism came later, so we certainly shouldn't pretend that he did.
But there is a rather lovely coincidence.
His map doesn't really end at its edges either.
The Peirce Quincuncial projection tessellates.
Place copies of the square map alongside one another and the geography reconnects across the edges. In theory, you can continue the pattern indefinitely.
Peirce probably had something considerably more profound in mind when he was thinking about the continuity of nature.
But we like to think he'd approve.
Image - Strebe
A map from 1879 for the world of 2026
We developed our own Peirce Quincuncial World Map to mark The Future Mapping Company's 20th birthday.
At the time, much of its appeal to us was simply that it made the familiar unfamiliar.
It takes something we've all seen thousands of times — a map of the world — and rearranges it sufficiently that you have to look again.
Today, that different viewpoint feels remarkably current.
No map projection can give us a completely neutral view of the world. Every map puts something in the middle and something else towards the edge. Every projection changes some things in order to preserve others.
That's not a failure of maps. It's part of what makes them so fascinating.
For those of us brought up looking at European-centred world maps, the Arctic has quite literally spent most of its life at the top of the page — somewhere we look towards rather than into.
Politically, environmentally and economically, that's changing.
Greenland, Golden Dome, northern shipping routes and the growing strategic focus on the Arctic are all reminders that the top of the map isn't necessarily the edge of the world.
Sometimes you just need to turn the map around.
And occasionally, a rather extraordinary American gentleman from 1879 can help.
