"The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use." There is a diffe

"The Mercator projection is often held to be an imperialist distortion of the globe, and that's what traditional latitudes and longitudes use." There is a difference between a projected coordinate system (like Mercator) and geographic coordinate systems. In Mercator you use projected Mercator-Meters not Latitude and Longitude. All you need to know for local R² (2D Euclidean) estimates, is that longitudes scale with cos(latitude), that's it. How does your system handle 89°N 0°W, and 89°N, 180°W ? Does it infer 222km or 346km? If it's the latter, it's not spherical as in S². There is quite a body of research into equal-area hierarchical partitions of Sphere. Adressing there is mostly neither trivial nor intuitive and also not compatible with most raster data formats when it comes to storage. Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS, Pyxis), HealPIX, H3 as variant of DGGRID, EQ_REGIONS, just to name those I remember. So I'm watching ;)