What causes a flight path between distant cities to appear as a wide, curved arc on a flat Mercator projection map?
Answer
It is a visual distortion introduced by projecting the spherical surface onto a two-dimensional plane.
When the great circle route, which is the straightest line on the globe, is traced onto a flat map projection like Mercator, the projection distorts the path, making the necessary shortest route appear curved or circuitous.
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