It’s called Null Island and it’s a buoy

If they ask you about The islands you have visited Your answer can vary. You may have visited one, several or none. We will put the last case in serious. Although you think you have not visited an island, the story that comes next will show you that, you may have been in one (many times). His name: Null Island. His paradox: you will only find it on the maps.

The island is not island. Actually, under the name of Null Island we are Before a location Cartographic, although not any, since it is zero degrees of latitude and zero degrees in length. In other words, it is about the intersection where the first Earth meridian meets Ecuador. To be more exact, if that is possible, it turns out to be a point in the Gulf of Guinea, a portion of the eastern tropical Atlantic Ocean off the western coast of Africa.

The reason for its existence? That to geolocate any point on a map, the premise is that there is a starting point (or 0-0 place) from which to draw the rest of the points. The choice of this specific point on the map has to do with the fact that the intersection between the Zero and Ecuador It is the starting point of World Geodetic System 1984that is, the cartography on which the GPS system is based.

Why the Gulf of Guinea. Because it is part of the South Atlantic Ocean, something like the armpit of Africa. It is the mass of water right off the coast where Western Africa curves south to become central Africa. The Gulf is right in the middle of any standard world map, and that is not a coincidence. It is the meeting point for the two geodetic measurement lines, the first meridian and the Ecuador. Or, expressed in length and latitude: 0 ° N, 0 ° E.

And that is precisely Null Island, the Perfect anchor for non -geolocalized dataalthough, as you will have imagined, it is not an island as such, it is rather the colloquial name of the intersection of these two main orthodromes. In mathematical code, and by extension also in Geodesia, an ortododrom (or maximum circle) is the longest possible line drawn around a sphere, dividing it in two halves, or hemispheres, perfectly the same.

It is a buoy. It is not a joke. Obviously, it is not a real continental mass, but if you literally sail towards the Gulf of Guinea, towards the intersection between the world’s first meridian and Ecuador, You will find a great buoy. That is the closest thing to Null Island that exists on the planet.

Null Island (also known as La Boya Station 13010 – Soul)

Known as Station 13010 – Soulthe climate monitoring buoy is part of the prediction and research system tied in the Atlantic (pirate) that monitors the tropical Atlantic ocean. Together with 16 other buoys, the floating weather station measures things such as wind speed, air temperature and humidity to help inform meteorological forecasts and climatic models.

Therefore, in the real world, Null Island is a buoy, and in the virtual, a hypothetical point where they stalk data points out of place.

The origin of the (no) island. Ecuador, equidistant of the poles, gives the northern and south hemispheres. He Greenwich meridianwhich divides the world into eastern and western hemispheres, is a more arbitrary line. His status as the first meridian in the world It was not established until 1884at the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC the French abstained in the final vote because they had campaigned for the Paris meridian.

That was the year zero for our point north north, zero east. What happened? Due to its distance, the location remained culturally insignificant until 2011, when it appeared in The map data set of the public domain of Natural Earth as “Null Island”.

As they explained then In a statement On the birth or invention of Null: “We have added a country of debugging of errors with an indeterminate sovereignty class called Null Island. It is a fictitious island of a square meter located off the coast of Africa, where Ecuador and the primary meridian cross. Focusing it on latitude 0 and length 0, it is useful to mark geocoding failures that appear as 0.0 in many services.”

Why have you been. Because you have surely wrong, and not only one, but many times, looking for the location of a site. Although there is no null island, it is that convenient place name for a frequently used place. Zero-zero reading arises frequently as an error, due to the lack of data or software failures.

In the background, something that we use every day is the real person responsible for our visits to Null: the GPS. When we do an erroneous search, we try to reach a place that does not exist or an error of the system occurs, at which time it relocates precisely there, at the zero-zero point, in Null Island.

Image | Graham Curran

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*An earlier version of this article was published in July 2024