The world's most visited island doesn't exist.

At 0° N, 0° E, where the equator and prime meridian cross in the Gulf of Guinea, sits "Null Island". Only a weather buoy floats there; the nearest land is 570 km away. Yet data keeps landing on it: when software can't find coordinates it stores 0,0, dropping photos, addresses and workouts into the middle of the Atlantic.

Useful: A dot in the Gulf of Guinea in your data almost always means geocoding failed.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

DatenGpsKartografie

Difficulty:

Related cards

The prime meridian isn't where the line in Greenwich is.Tourists stand on the brass prime-meridian line in Greenwich. Your GPS there reads 0.0015° West …
In 2017 Australia had to shift its map by 1.8 metres.The Australian Plate creeps about 7 cm a year to the north-northeast. But the coordinate system …
A town was invented to catch map copiers. Then it became real.In the 1920s Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers of General Drafting put an anagram of their …
How to turn coordinates into kilometres in your head.A degree of latitude is always about 111 km, 110.6 km at the equator to 111.7 km at the poles; one …
How to read hills, valleys and cliffs from contour lines.Each contour joins points of equal height; the gap between two lines, the contour interval, is in …
How long is Britain's coast? Depends on your ruler.Measure the coast in 100 km steps and you get about 2,800 km; in 50 km steps, 3,400 km. The shorter …
How a credit bureau decides whether you're creditworthy.Credit bureaus collect data on accounts, loans, contracts and missed payments and condense it into …
How a ZIP file shrinks without losing a single bit.Two tricks. First, the algorithm replaces repetitions with a back-reference: 'same as 200 …

Keep reading

This card belongs to the topic Language & World. Every card is short, cites a source and can be saved – due ones come back by themselves later.

About Doomlearn · Projects · Legal notice · Privacy · Terms