Planet Online World Atlas Units Converter Geography in the News Free Newsletter Get travel news, alerts, tips, deals, and trivia delivered free to your email in-box. The only way to accurately represent the Earth is on a globe. Since globes are round like the Earth, they show the correct shape, location, and relative size of all land and water features. Thus, you can think of a globe as a miniature planet Earth. Because they're flat, maps can never show a perfect representation of the Earth.
Maps are much more convenient than globes for many purposes.
Even maps of larger areas, such as continents or the world, can be drawn with enough accuracy to be useful and practical for many purposes. All rights reserved.