What do you think of this fact?
On some digital maps, a spot in the middle of the Atlantic is surprisingly busy: photos, addresses, fitness data. The spot is called Null Island. The problem: it doesn’t exist.
The world’s zero point
Where the equator and the prime meridian cross, you’ll find the point with the coordinates 0° N, 0° E. It lies in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of West Africa. According to Big Think, the nearest land, Ghana or São Tomé, is about 650 kilometers (400 miles) away. There’s nothing there but open ocean.
Still, data lands there all the time. The reason is a classic software glitch: when a program can’t convert an address into coordinates, say because of a typo in a street name or a house number that doesn’t exist, it sometimes just spits out “0,0”. And since 0,0 is a real point on the globe, the entry gets plotted right there.
An island for errors
To make these errors easier to spot, the point got a name. According to Atlas Obscura, the free map dataset Natural Earth added “Null Island” no later than 2011. Since then, the island that isn’t one has been an inside joke among cartographers and data analysts.
The spot isn’t completely empty, by the way. Exactly at 0° N, 0° E floats a weather buoy numbered 13010 and nicknamed “Soul”. It measures weather and ocean data and is part of a measuring network called PIRATA.
Bonus fact: According to Big Think, the buoy is moored in water about 5 kilometers deep. It’s one of 17 buoys that have been taking measurements in the tropical Atlantic since 1997.
So Null Island is both nowhere and one of the busiest places in the digital world.
If you ever find a photo of yourself in the middle of the Atlantic in some app, now you know: welcome to Null Island.