Is called Null Island and even though you have never been there physically, you have seen it a few times on your phone. After this statement, you could answer us that you travel a lot… well, you still wouldn’t have set foot there because Null Island is a very particular cartographic location: It is at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude. And it is fictitious.
Or what is the same, Null Island is located at the intersection between the Earth’s zero meridian and the equator. More specifically, it is a point in the Gulf of Guinea located in the eastern tropical Atlantic Ocean. And well, technically It is not an island, but a buoy.
So Null Island is actually a buoy, and you’ve probably come across it on your mobile maps more than once. Its reason for being makes perfect sense: in order to provide information about a location, it is essential to first have a reference point. Zero, that is. And Null Island is the zero of cartography. World Geodetic System 1984on which the Global Positioning System is based. In a nutshell: Null Island is the GPS zero.
From being a simple buoy to record time to being the GPS zero
Null Island, actually. By Graham Curran – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
The buoy popularly known as Null Island is also known as Station 13010 – Soul and is part of the Atlantic Moored Prediction and Research (PIRATA) system in charge of the tropical Atlantic Ocean. Its more mundane mission is to measure parameters such as wind speed, air temperature or humidity for climate models.
We were talking earlier about the location of Null Island on the map, which is not a coincidence: it is right in the middle of any standard world map, the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator, with a longitude and latitude respectively of 0°N, 0°E. This reference dates back to the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC in 1884. On one side were the northern and southern hemispheres divided by the equator and on the other, the Greenwich Meridianwhich separates the world into the northern and southern hemispheres, which would not be assigned as the prime meridian until the vote that took place at that event.
Null Island. OpenStreetMap
We have to move back in time to 2011, when this point appeared as ‘Null island’ in the map dataset in the public domain of Natural Earth . And they gave an explanation it’s a statement:
“We’ve added a debugging country with an indeterminate sovereignty class called Null Island. It’s a fictional island measuring one square meter off the coast of Africa, where the Equator and Prime Meridian intersect. Centering it at 0 latitude and 0 longitude is useful for flagging geocoding errors that appear as 0.0 in many services.”
Being the zero of everything, it is the perfect spot for non-geolocated data. Or what is the same: is hardcoded as default location for mapping errors in many digital mapping systems. So when you make a mistake looking for the wrong location, the place in question doesn’t exist, there’s missing data, there’s a software glitch, or a system error occurs, GPS takes you to the Island of Null, to zero zero.
Via | Xataka
Cover | Photo by Alex Perez in Unsplash