At 0°N 0°E, where the prime meridian crosses the equator, there is an island. But there is no land there to be found, and the seabed lies nearly 5,000 meters down. Roughly 600 kilometers south of West Africa Null Island is merely a conceptual ladmass: a joke that got out of hand and became a famed cartographic peculiarity. Among other things, it's beome a useful place to store bad data: anything with broken or incomplete coordinates may end up there, giving Null Island its own inhabitants: bugs.
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". As reported in January 2018 by Bellingcat, 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 locations.
It started as geospatial humor and spread after the public-domain Natural Earth dataset added it around 2010, describing a one-meter-square island flagged "scale rank 100," meaning it should never appear on maps. Alas, now it was on the maps.
Embedded below is a screenshot of activity tracked by jogging app Strava on Null Island. It's a busy place! Conceptually speaking, at least. Here is is on OpenStreetMap.
If the proliferation of interest is recent, there's been something or other there for a long time. The 1957 cartoon Colonel Bleep set its action on "Zero Zero Island". You can watch our heroes build their base there in the episode embedded below.
The 1960s Japanese-American sci-fi film Latitude Zero placed a utopian community there, albeit on the sea floor. Here's the trailer:
Null Island's come up before here (previously!) as the location of a weather buoy, but it turns out it's no longer in service. Part of the PIRATA monitoring network run by the U.S., France, and Brazil and nicknamed "Soul," it was decommissioned in March 2021.
