Say you’re making use of a geocoding system looking for specific pairs of coordinates; however, somehow said coordinates have some errors. Still, the service will place you in a specific geographic position, an island known as Null Island.
Orthodromes and hemispheres
Mapping the entire Earth has been a challenge for those who generate geological maps; but with today’s technology, it is even possible to travel to any part of the planet, at least virtually. All you need is the exact coordinates and enter them into a geocoding search engine such as Google Earth or Bing Maps, and you’ll be looking at the geographic makeup of your destination.
All these systems are based on the cartographic measurements that have divided the planet along different imaginary lines that today allow us to know exactly in which region of the Earth we are positioned. It is amazing to think that with a simple query you can find where any region of the planet is located at will.
The imaginary lines in question, which result from the orthodromic that in mathematics and applied therefore to the geodesic figure of the Earth, are the longest possible lines drawn around a sphere. In that sense, they divide our planet into two perfectly equal areas.
But what does all this have to do with Null Island? It turns out that this region of the Earth is the exact point where two of the most important orthodromes in cartography intersect: the equator and the zero meridians. Where longitude equals zero and latitude equals zero, the equator, which divides the Earth into the northern and southern hemispheres, and the zero meridians, which divides the planet into the east and west sides, intersect.
To locate it a little on the map, this point of the Earth is located in the armpit of Africa, in the middle of the Gulf of Guinea on the eastern Atlantic Ocean. And it is precisely here where the so-called Null Island is located, which curiously, like its coordinates, has zero lands, that is to say, it does not exist. So how is it called an island?
The null island that lives in the modern imagination
It turns out that this place where there is nothing but water lives in the cartographic imaginary since 1884. That was the year scientists at the International Meridian Conference voted to establish the Greenwich Meridian as the Earth’s prime meridian. Since then, this region has served as the intersection of the coordinates 0ºN, and 0ºE.
The point where the zeros intersect went completely unnoticed until, in 2011, it appeared in Natural Earth’s public domain map dataset, where it received the name Null Island. That’s how it went from being a non-existent site to an imaginary one, which is not quite the same thing.
Since geocoding systems indexed it to their data, it has become an imaginary island that has an imaginary geographic map, as well as its flag and history. And although it may seem like a cartographic joke, the truth is that the construction of the non-existent island as a constituted political division has a practical purpose. This location is the default point where systems such as Google Maps, position the thousands of erroneous searches of its users.
Today there is a whole background behind the island lost in the ocean, where there is only a buoy floating in the middle of the water. The idea of an imaginary island and all that has been built around this idea, makes us wish that Null Island was real, however, it is just a curiosity about the planet’s cartography. Although if you want to know a real but hidden spot on the maps of the Earth, you’d better look for Nemo Point.
Text courtesy of Ecoosfera