Null Island


Null Island is a name for the point on the Earth's surface where the prime meridian and the equator cross, located in international waters in the Gulf of Guinea off the west African coast. In the WGS84 datum, this is at zero degrees latitude and longitude, and is the location of a buoy. The name 'Null Island' serves as both a joke based around the suppositional existence of an island there and as a name to which coordinates erroneously set to 0,0 are assigned in placenames databases in order to more easily find and fix them. The nearest land is a small islet offshore of Ghana, between Akwidaa and Dixcove at, to the north. The seabed depth at this place is around.

Natural Earth

In terms of computing and placenames databases, the coordinates for Null Island were added to the Natural Earth public domain map dataset –2011, after which the term came into wide use. Since then, the 'island' has through fiction been given a geography, history, and flag. Natural Earth describes the entity as a "1 meter square island" with "scale rank 100, indicating it should never be shown in mapping". The name 'Null' refers to the two zero coordinates, as null values are often coerced to a value of 0 when converted to an integer context or "no-nulls allowed" context.
The location is used by mapping systems to trap errors. Such errors arise, for example, where an image artifact is erroneously associated to the location by software which cannot attribute a geoposition, and instead associates a latitude and longitude of "Null,Null" or "0,0".
Other data mapped to the location include activity events from the Strava fitness-tracking app, apparently mapped to the location due to users entering "0,0" coordinates to disguise their real location.

'Soul' buoy

There is a moored weather and sea observation buoy at 0.000 N 0.000 E. This buoy is part of the PIRATA system operated jointly by the United States, France, and Brazil.