Null Island

0,0

This morning, our cruise ship circled an island that doesn’t exist.

It is a digital trash bucket of a place that marks zero longitude and zero latitude along the west coast of Africa.

An announcement came over the PA system at 6:30 a.m. when we were about to cross the intersection of these two lines, and passengers rushed to the upper decks to try to position themselves exactly at said intersection.

After over 120 days at sea, simple things like this amuse us. Adjusting to normal life is going to be hard, if impossible at all.

What some may find fascinating about this fictitious island is the fact that it represents the default location for all unknown coordinates on the globe. In other words, in the world of digital cartography, errors default to null, or 0,0. So, cartographers with a sense of humor decided to give this location a name, Null Island.

Little did they know that cruise ship captains would turn this location into a tourist destination, complete with an overhead drone observing the ship circling the dot on the ocean.

While this “island” exists only in databases so that cartographers can spot errors in their digital maps, it represents a point of convergence of digital and real worlds, the stuff that science fiction is made of.

So, we move on.

Heading northwest around Africa, we will make our way to Europe and then home.

I hope we get a certificate on our beds tonight certifying that we were in all four quadrants of the world for an instant this morning.

At this point in our journey, it doesn’t take a lot to amuse us.

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