Judging by the geographic data of the digital images of countless people, it has to be one of the most visited tourist sites are on this planet. Not New York, not a Caribbean island, not even Amsterdam. No, a place some 600 kilometers south of Ghana and a thousand kilometers west of Gabon, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic.
However when you look at a map, you will find little hotels, restaurants and other facilities which look to please tourists. In fact, you will still not find tiny sliver of land where you can sun bathe only in a fetal position. This might be the place where the lost city of Atlantis is? Nor that. But Null Island. YouTube channel Minute Earth explains what that is exactly.
Null and null
A troubleshooting country has been added with an Indeterminate sovereignty class called Null Island. It is a fictional, 1 meter square island located off Africa where the equator and prime meridian cross. Being centered at 0,0 (zero latitude, zero longitude) it is useful for flagging geocode failures which are routed to 0,0 by most mapping services. Aside: “Null Islands” exist for all local coordinate reference systems besides WGS84 like State Plane (and global if not using modern Greenwich prime meridian). Null Island in Natural Earth is scaleRank 100, indicating it should never be shown in mapping.
It’s totally fictitious and is designed as a gentle poke in the ribs for people who don’t check the return value from their geocoder and end up putting a pin on a web map in the middle of the ocean.
