Are the Arctic and Antarctica mostly unmapped by Google earth?

[psychonaut]

@Chronos

I’m not sure what that means. Does that just mean that the globe is normalized to a sphere before the Mercator projection is applied?

Well, yes, according to the articles I linked to. For example:

@OpenLayers

This term is used to refer to the fact that these providers use a Mercator projection which treats the earth as a sphere, rather than a projection which treats the earth as an ellipsoid. This affects calculations done based on treating the map as a flat plane, and is therefore important to be aware of when working with these map providers.

It’s actually a bit more complicated than that (or a lot more complicated, if you’re trying to use out-of-the-box mapping tools to work with the data); read the discussion on the third link for all the niggling details.