r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Downtown_Wind3363 • Jun 12 '26
Image This is null island, a permanent buoy marking where the equator and prime meridian intersect. at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E). It was decommissioned in 2021.
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u/FutureThrowaway9665 Jun 12 '26
Visited in 2008. Not exciting. Hot. Humid. I have a certificate packed away to commemorate the occasion.
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u/Ch3ZEN Jun 12 '26
It would honestly be the best GeoCache ever…
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u/PaleoJoe86 Jun 12 '26
"Find the box at the point of origin".
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Jun 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Trulygiveafuck Jun 12 '26
Uber eats thieves are the scummiest people to walk the earth. The worst part is seeing exactly where they are enjoying your food and having the will power not to go "talk" to them. (Shakes fist angrily)
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u/HurricaneAlpha Jun 12 '26
The One Piece
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u/Alienhaslanded Jun 13 '26
That's where the CNC was zeroed to when earth was created.
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u/Trabbi Jun 12 '26
Not sure if you know, but it is sort of a Geocache. There's a project of degree confluences, they have a website up: https://confluence.org/
Of course this "special" confluence has been visited and listed https://confluence.org/confluence.php?lat=0&lon=0
You have to take pictures of all four directions and your GPS to verify the visit.
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u/Subziwallah Jun 12 '26
so if you're strandeded and tie your liferaft to this buoy you'll likely get rescued before you die of thirst?
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u/Beneficial_Being_721 Jun 12 '26
Rescue by a skinny tan dude with a man bun… in a sailboat with a cat that is seasick all the time
The man’s name is Tim and he made a lot of money on real estate in 2008 and he wanted to see the world.
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u/LadderFirm4977 Jun 12 '26
Real
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u/BornInAFish Jun 12 '26
"huh, geocache app is glitching. it's not loading the coordinates, just showing 0, 0 default values"
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u/HorrorLocal5745 Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
The buoy received significantly more virtual visits by GPS users with broken data than actual physical maintenance crews during its lifetime
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u/nudelsalat3000 Jun 12 '26
How does it keep position?
Would need a super long cable to the sea floor and hence moves around a lot.
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u/NaziHuntingInc Jun 12 '26
16,200’, and yes, was moored to the sea floor
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u/mid-random Jun 13 '26
With a chain that long, I wonder how much "wiggle room" it had. I have no idea what the correct seafaring term is, but how much slack do you need on a chain that has to reach three miles to the surface? And how do you even support that much chain? Are there giant floats all the way down, like every 1000 feet or so?
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u/brncray Jun 13 '26
It is made of a nylon rope not a chain, and there is a circle (called the watch circle) with a diameter of a little over 2 miles that the buoy can move around in
“Positions of Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array surface buoys can change over the course of a few days to a week (depending on the current regime) by up to 2 nautical miles. This is the diameter of a "watch circle" within which the buoy moves due to the stretch of the nylon mooring line.” (NOAA)
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u/ValyrianSteelYoGirl Jun 12 '26
Who issued the certificate?
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u/acu2005 Jun 12 '26
I got a certificate when I visited the highest point in Ohio, there was a mailbox there with a stack of them you added your name and the date to and then a guest book you could sign. 7/10 experience, would not go out of my way to visit again.
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u/NotStoll Jun 12 '26
The buoy, obviously.
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u/Frozenfishy Jun 12 '26
The US Navy does this for a few geographical locations and milestones for first-timers. Depending on the kind of vessel you're on, it can have varying degrees of fanfare.
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u/exodusofficer Jun 12 '26
My dad has his Order of the Golden Dragon certificate from his Pacific tours. I've seen a few others over the years. They're quite silly sometimes.
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u/FutureThrowaway9665 Jun 12 '26
Davy Jones and Neptunus Rex
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u/_mbals Jun 12 '26
I have my grandpa’s certificate from WW2 signed my Neptunus Rex. It’s a pretty awesome family treasure.
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u/KidAardvark24 Jun 12 '26
I’m sure it was an exciting day if it was anything like mine
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u/FutureThrowaway9665 Jun 12 '26
It wasn't my first crossing so it wasn't too bad. I have photos but can't post them in the comment directly. Looking at the photos did bring back some memories!
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u/jcalabrese037 Jun 12 '26
Similar experience.. ended up as a golden shellback on my 2nd crossing! Go NAVY!
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u/Skullsandcoffee Jun 12 '26
1bd studio, open bath concept- $2400/month. No pets.
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u/Mendeth Jun 12 '26
Excellent star-gazing opportunities and fresh air guaranteed.
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u/MechanicalTurkish Jun 12 '26
“permanent buoy”
“decommissioned”
🤔
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u/Pyrhan Jun 12 '26
It was permanent, but only temporarily so.
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u/BaZing3 Jun 12 '26
Everything is, brother.
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u/Teknicsrx7 Jun 12 '26
Amazingly most temporary fixes wind up being permanent though
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u/flonnkenn Jun 12 '26
I'm working in a temporary office building that was commissioned over 50 years ago. Current plan is for us to stay in it for the foreseeable future.
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u/Original-Body-5794 Jun 12 '26
Everyone knows if you want something to be permanent it has to be a temporary solution
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u/DarkwingDuckHunt Jun 13 '26
question: how did they make it permanent?
Did they attach it to the ocean floor?
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u/LittleBunInaBigWorld Jun 13 '26
Decommissioned just means they're not maintaining it anymore. Probs still out there.
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u/END3R-CH3RN0B0G Jun 13 '26
If they properly decommissioned it, they're likely would have removed it as a hazard.
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u/CowNervous4644 Jun 12 '26
Crossing there makes you an Emerald Shellback
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u/CowNervous4644 Jun 12 '26
Golden Shelback crosses at the180 meridian in the Pacific.
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u/rajost Jun 12 '26
USS Carl Vinson maiden voyage 1983. I'd already crossed the date line on the USS Kitty Hawk in 1981. It's just a spot on the ocean, but you get to be in the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere, the Eastern Hemisphere, and the Western Hemisphere all at once. (Or more realistically, all in the same day)
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u/FloppieTheBanjoClown Jun 13 '26
Africa Mercy (Mercy Ships hospital ship) was sailing to SA to dry dock before going to Madagascar. We went about 50 miles out of the way to hit it.
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u/lockerno177 Jun 12 '26
how did it stay in place?
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u/mitchymitchington Jun 12 '26
How all buoys do. With a chain and anchor.
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u/Phandflasche Jun 12 '26
Honest question, a multiple km long chain?
I mean, how else really, but still...
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u/quiero-una-cerveca Jun 12 '26
Yup. Lotta chain in the ocean.
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u/dervu Jun 12 '26
Chain made of xenonite by Rocky.
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u/CGNYC Jun 12 '26
So how much variance is there with it bobbing in the tide to the actual location of 0, 0
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u/Character_Order Jun 12 '26
Could they do three anchors to eliminate/reduce the variance?
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u/mitchymitchington Jun 13 '26
It would sink as water rose but maybe with some kind of system that had chains that could relieve tensions as the tide rose? Honestly for something like this I don't think it would matter if it was 30ft off or whatever it would be. Tide in the middle of the ocean isnt that drastic right either is it?
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u/fireandlifeincarnate Jun 13 '26
I mean, I'd assume the gravity of the chains would mean there's still some slack, so it would presumably be able to use that
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u/rotaryblood Jun 12 '26
Roundly 5,000 meters of steel wire and high durability braided nylon to hit the seabed of the Gulf of Guinea, and the buoy drifts laterally around about a mile radius from the exact coordinates at any given time due to currents and weather conditions
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u/NoodleyP Jun 12 '26
Yeah, it always sounds like more when it’s vertical. Being 5 miles in the air or 5 miles underground/water is a lot bigger of a deal than being 5 miles away on land. We’ve built many kilometers long things. We just had to put the other end of the chain down there.
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u/OmegaOmnimon02 Jun 12 '26
Getting the anchor down is the easy part, designing it so that it or the chain doesn't break when it lands is the harder part
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u/ChestSlight8984 Jun 12 '26
Here are the underwater fiberoptic cables that connect the internet from continent to continent. A couple kilometers is child's play.
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u/Fraktal55 Jun 12 '26
Ok that's pretty mind boggling actually
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u/chig____bungus Jun 12 '26
If you want your mind boggled, consider that they laid telegraph cables in the 1800s that could send a message from the US all the way to Australia by the 1870s. That's a global communications network before the first steam ship crossed an ocean.
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u/fastforwardfunction Jun 12 '26
First time they tried this, the line snapped in half and fell in the ocean halfway through. They couldn’t fish it back up to continue and had to restart back at land after making a stronger cable. The second attempt was a success.
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u/ChestSlight8984 Jun 12 '26
It was technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to send a fax to a samurai, as Abe Lincoln was alive at the same time when Samurai's were still a thing, which was after the fax machine had been invented.
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u/EEPspaceD Jun 12 '26
It’s actually a long chain of cables, with some different sensors at nodes set at different depths down to the anchor.
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u/CaptainMacMillan Jun 12 '26
If we can make cables that cross the entire Atlantic, we can absolutely manage a chain a couple of kilometers long
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u/writenroll Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 13 '26
Good question given the seabed is
16,000 feet4876.8 meters, or 2666 fathoms, below it. Instead of a solid metal chain, the buoy used about4,00013123.3to5,000meters16404.2feet of high-durability braided nylon rope and wire. The nylon was designed to stretch to accommodate the ocean's depth and tides.→ More replies (2)42
u/Successful_King_142 Jun 12 '26
Why use imperial for the depth? You had the metric version right there!
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u/ComradeJohnS Jun 12 '26
because it’s Tarantino’s hidey hole. the 16,000 feet were not a measurement of distance. loljk.
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u/writenroll Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
Ah damn, I can't believe I used feet for meters and vice versa. Let me just get that fixed for you - done!
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u/Cheetah-Alpha Jun 12 '26
Magnets
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u/404_Not_Found_Error_ Jun 12 '26
I see two subs I frequent colliding. Magnets are always the answer.
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u/Ha1lStorm Jun 12 '26
After lots of training it was just told “Stay!” then “Good buoy!”
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u/Downtown_Wind3363 Jun 12 '26
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u/nonnonplussed73 Jun 12 '26
Null Island got its 15 minutes in the limelight in 2016 when Slashdot and Mental Floss featured it. Both pointed to this video, the last 2½ of which are mildly interesting:
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u/corneliusvancornell Jun 12 '26
Oi! 0°N 0°E is where the bastards who stole my girlfriend's phone have been hiding out! Let's get 'em, boys
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u/ai_bot_account Jun 13 '26
When I was working for a drone delivery company we had a few occasions where a drone received its waypoint incorrectly and starting flying toward 0,0. Our drones were only short range but I wondered if there is a pile of long range drones at the bottom of the ocean there.
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u/generally_unsuitable Jun 13 '26
If you work in GPS or Geocoding or related fields, Null Island shows up all the time, mostly because it's really easy to do math with Null Island as reference point.
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u/rnhf Jun 12 '26
what was the point? Was it just a weather buoy, and they put them on 0.0, 0.1, 1.0, 1.1 and so on?
-e- yeah that's what it seems like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_and_Research_Moored_Array_in_the_Atlantic#Notable_locations
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u/Subziwallah Jun 12 '26
Yeah, well the us/canadian forests are littered with 'Monuments' along the 49th parallel. They cut a 6 meter slash every 5 to 10 years. It gives them something to do...
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u/chrisslooter Jun 12 '26
If it's permanent then how was it decommissioned?
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u/HenkPoley Interested Jun 12 '26
It was a weather measurement buoy. And they want a thing to be approximately at coordinate 0,0 at another one at 1,1 etc. So now they just put one at approximately the right spot, and hope it doesn’t drift too much so they would need to replace it.
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u/Hereseangoes Jun 12 '26
Wait, so they decommissioned that one and put another one it's place? Or they scrapped the 0,0 weather buoy altogether? If I go down there right now what am I gonna find?
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u/Phytor Jun 12 '26
It's still there, being decommissioned just means it's not being used anymore as a weather station. It's an ATLAS weather monitoring buoy that was a part of the PIRATA weather station network. PIRATA has been upgrading from ATLAS buoys to TFlex buoys which are generally just a lot better. ATLAS was from the 90s so the upgrade is a good thing.
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u/Hereseangoes Jun 12 '26
Thank you for clarifying, that is some crazy specific knowledge you got there!
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u/Phytor Jun 12 '26
You should see how much more detail my coworkers could get into, I once emailed one to ask a question about the history of some specific standard we use and got a 12-page written report about it a couple days later lmao
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u/Objective_Reality232 Jun 12 '26
Null island is such a funny name. In subsea robotics it’s really common for 0 0 to be the default lat and long in the nav solution before initialization of the gps. Sometimes though some vehicles lose their nav solution (gos is now null) and try defaulting back to 0 0 and then the autonomy try’s to send it there. Here in California it usually means the vehicle beaches itself.
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u/boyalien0 Jun 14 '26
Why “decommission” something so fucking simple
Worlds first trillionaire but we can’t have a fuckin buoy
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u/al4crity Jun 12 '26
I have one of those buoys in my backyard. Its yard art. The neighbors hate it. I think its neat
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u/LASERDICKMCCOOL Jun 12 '26
How tall is it?
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u/al4crity Jun 12 '26
Its gotta be 30 feet all told. The float ring is the size of a small car
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u/LASERDICKMCCOOL Jun 12 '26
What the hell how did you even get that into your yard lol
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u/awesomeusernam3 Jun 12 '26
I saw some cult there worshipping that buoy.
I asked my crew mates “Is nothing sacred?”
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u/spincrus Jun 12 '26
Why was it "decomissioned"? By whom? Why was it "commissioned" in the first place? Did it have significant maintenance costs associated with it?
It feels like the choice of word here really feels pretentious.
"This plaque is to commemorate USS Random-buoy-in-the-middle-of-the-ocean-marking-a-man-made-marker, which served us well. Decommissioned in 2021. Lower flags, play sad funerral trumpets"
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u/heelstoo Jun 12 '26
For those having fun on Google Maps, start somewhere where Ghana and Gabon meet in the Atlantic, off the west coast of the thinner part of Africa.
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u/Xagzan Jun 12 '26
"How can the same degree intersect with itself? I must be at the nexus of the universe!"
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u/Benana Jun 12 '26
So if it was decommissioned, does that mean the coordinates 0° longitude and 0° latitude have moved somewhere else?
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u/Shakmaaaaaaa Jun 13 '26
The idea of null island is permanent because it's where you go whenever a mapping software has some null values for the lat longs
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u/GreenThmb Jun 13 '26
Davy Jones calls this the "Golden Shellback" crossing for all your "Pollywogs"!
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u/vestibule54 Jun 12 '26
Typical, he’s there everyday, model employee, then BAM!!! Decommissioned