The Prime Meridian is an arbitrary line drawn from the North Pole to the South Pole as a starting point for us to measure longitude. It was decided to place the meridian in a line going through Greenwich, UK, at the International Meridian Conference in 1884. Before that, different countries used their own meridians as a starting point. The Prime Meridian is said to be the line between the Western Hemisphere and the Eastern Hemisphere, but as you can see, that doesn’t make sense because then a big chunk of Africa, plus Spain and Britain, would be in the Western Hemisphere. Still, Britain held a lot of power in the 1880s. The equator is not arbitrary, because it’s the midpoint between the poles, which are designated by the earth’s rotation.
The point where the Prime Meridian crosses the equator is 0° longitude and 0° latitude. That place is hundreds of miles off the coast of Ghana, with no islands nearby. The numbers were just a point on a map before satellites and digital geolocation, but in the modern era, errors in geolocation will default to 0°,0°. In the internet age, this point on earth has come to be called Null Island. Redditors have designed flags for Null Island, and you can buy souvenir t-shirts. Only there is no island there. But there is a scientific buoy, named Soul Buoy, installed in 1997. Read about the imaginary Null Island at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura
Source: neatorama