Welcome to Null Island, where lost data goes to die
Where the prime meridian meets the equator, a non-existent island captures our imagination — and our non-geocoded data.
Credit: Google Earth / Ruland Kolen
Key Takeaways
- The equator and the prime meridian meet at a place denoted as 0°N, 0°E.
- This location, in the Gulf of Guinea, is where non-geocoded data goes to die.
- Recently renamed “Null Island,” it has also captured the imagination — and acquired a map and several flags.
You’ve got a list of geocoded data points, but due to error or omission, one of them has nothing set as its location. It may still show up on a map. If so, look for its pin to drop on a very specific place in the international waters off the Gulf of Guinea: Null Island.
Africa’s armpit
Think of the Gulf of Guinea, part of the South Atlantic Ocean, as Africa’s armpit. It’s the body of water just off the coast of where West Africa bends south to become Central Africa. The Gulf is right in the middle of your standard world map, and that’s no coincidence. It is the meeting point of the two baselines of geodetic measurement, the prime meridian and the equator. Or, expressed in longitude and latitude: 0°N, 0°E.
You guessed it: this is Null Island — the perfect anchorage for non-geolocated data. But don’t go rent a boat on the coast of Ghana or the island of São Tomé, two of the nearest bits of dry land. After crossing about 400 miles (650 km) of open water, you will find more of the same upon arrival. Because, true to its appellation, Null Island is not an island.
Orthodromes and hemispheres
Null Island is merely the colloquial name for the intersection of these two prime orthodromes. In mathematics, and by extension also in geodesy, an orthodrome (or great circle) is the longest possible line drawn around a sphere, thus dividing it into two perfectly equal halves, or hemispheres.
The Equator, equidistant from the poles, gives us the northern and southern hemispheres. The Greenwich meridian, which divides the world in eastern and western hemispheres, is a more arbitrary line. Its status as the world’s prime meridian was established only in 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in Washington D.C. The French abstained from the final vote; they had campaigned for the Paris meridian.
From non-existent to imaginary
So 1884 is year zero for our point at zero north, zero east. Because of its remoteness, the location remained culturally insignificant until 2011, when it showed up in the public domain map dataset of Natural Earth as “Null Island.”
That naming started off a remarkable process: it turned something non-existent into something imaginary, which is not quite the same. Suddenly, maps were drawn of Null Island, flags designed, fake backstories conjured up.
Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday
Squint, and you can almost see the island now. A small, tropical purgatory, far away from anywhere that matters, home to uncountable damaged and incomplete data points, stranded until they are fixed or erased. The weather is always humid, and there’s never a ship on the horizon.
An entire island has been given over to the world’s untethered data. The idea almost makes you wish that Null Island was real. But wait, there actually is something other than nothing at Null Island.
Providing some solidity: Soul Buoy
In 1997, the U.S., France, and Brazil installed a set of 17 weather and sea observation buoys in the South Atlantic, called the PIRATA system. One of these is moored to the seabed (about 16,000 ft or 5 km deep) at exactly 0°N, 0°E. This is station 13010 — also known as “Soul Buoy” — measuring air and water temperature, wind speed and direction, and other variables at zero zero point.
All of the 17 buoys, each named after a different music genre, are inspected annually, as the buoys attract fish, hence also fishing boats, whose visits can cause damage to the equipment or the buoy itself.
It would appear that, as non-existent places go, Null Island is more solid than most.
For another example of non-existent places acquiring solidity, check Strange Maps #643 on the curious case of Agloe, New York.
For more on the Greenwich Meridian, which is not quite where you’d expect it, see Strange Maps #731.
Don’t confuse Null Island with Nemo Point, another “vanishing point” on the high seas. More in Strange Maps #802.
Strange Maps #1141
Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.
In this article
Truth is stranger than fiction. Especially if that truth is caused by fiction. Consider the strange case of Agloe, a place name that started appearing on maps of New York State in the 1930s.
That picture of you at the Royal Observatory astride the Greenwich Meridian? It’s a lie.
Only in 1992 was science able to calculate the remotest part of the ocean
Cartography is serious business in Switzerland — but once in a while, the occasional map gag slips through.
The Spilhaus Projection may be more than 75 years old, but it has never been more relevant than today.
The closest star system to Earth, just over 4 light-years away, has three stars and at least one Earth-sized planet. Is it time to go there?
