The current projection is just very bad for large scale visualisation of mid to high latitudes. Everything is just too distorted. I see two solutions: 1) allowing a global orthographic projection on zoom out, 2) drop down list to choose between Mercator or Polar Stereographic (to avoid 3D). A quick search of Python Cartopy projection shows 1000 examples.

The current projection is just very bad for large scale visualisation of mid to high latitudes. Everything is just too distorted. I see two solutions: 1) allowing a global orthographic projection on zoom out, 2) drop down list to choose between Mercator or Polar Stereographic (to avoid 3D). A quick search of Python Cartopy projection shows 1000 examples.