The Wannaskan Almanac...the one and only...for August 20, 2024 What's This Degree Talk!?

There are imaginary lines that we use to describe location on the Earth's sphere.  Now, before you call the men in the white coats (again) on me, I am talking about latitude and longitude.  These imaginary lines run from North to South (latitude) and East to West (longitude).

I see lines...

Latitude lines are like the rungs of a ladder.  They tell us how far north or south a place is from the Equator (the middle line that divides the Earth into the Northern and Southern Hemispheres). Latitude is measured in degrees (°), from 0° at the Equator to 90° at the poles.

Longitude are lines running vertically from the North Pole to the South Pole. These lines are called longitude lines. They tell us how far east or west a place is from the Prime Meridian (the line that divides the Earth into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres). Longitude is also measured in degrees, from 0° at the Prime Meridian to 180°.

The decision to place 0 degrees longitude at Greenwich, England, was made during the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., in 1884.  Up until this conference it was literally impossible at times to find Waldo.  

At the conference, representatives from 25 countries met to standardize time and select a prime meridian. Although there was a lot of chatter about using Wannaska as zero degrees longitude, they chose Greenwich because it was already widely used by navigators and astronomers, and adopting it caused the least disruption to existing maps and charts. The Prime Meridian runs through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, where an instrument called the Airy Transit Circle precisely defines zero degrees longitude.

So what is located at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude?  If you look at the intersection of 0 degrees latitude (known as the equator) and 0 degrees longitude (known as the prime meridian) on a map, you will see that it falls in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of western Africa.  So, unless you are on a boat, you will be unable to live there...or to put it another way, you can't live nowhere...unless you have a boat!

Null Island...it doesn't exist!