![]() The origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km (390 mi) south of Tema, Ghana, a location often facetiously called Null Island.įurther information: Figure of the Earth, Reference ellipsoid, Geographic coordinate conversion, and Spatial reference system The visual grid on a map formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule. The combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. This is not to be conflated with the International Date Line, which diverges from it in several places for political and convenience reasons, including between far eastern Russia and the far western Aleutian Islands. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180☎. The prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The meridian of the British Royal Observatory in Greenwich, in southeast London, England, is the international prime meridian, although some organizations-such as the French Institut national de l'information géographique et forestière-continue to use other meridians for internal purposes. All meridians are halves of great ellipses (often called great circles), which converge at the North and South Poles. The "longitude" (abbreviation: Long., λ, or lambda) of a point on Earth's surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. The Equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the Equator, the fundamental plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The North Pole is 90° N the South Pole is 90° S. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the Equator and to each other. The "latitude" (abbreviation: Lat., ϕ, or phi) of a point on Earth's surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through (or close to) the center of the Earth. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911. The Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England as the zero-reference line. In 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. ![]() Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes' recovery of Ptolemy's text a little before 1300 the text was translated into Latin at Florence by Jacopo d'Angelo around 1407. After their work was translated into Arabic in the 9th century, Al-Khwārizmī's Book of the Description of the Earth corrected Marinus' and Ptolemy's errors regarding the length of the Mediterranean Sea, causing medieval Arabic cartography to use a prime meridian around 10° east of Ptolemy's line. Ptolemy's 2nd-century Geography used the same prime meridian but measured latitude from the Equator instead. Ptolemy credited him with the full adoption of longitude and latitude, rather than measuring latitude in terms of the length of the midsummer day. In the 1st or 2nd century, Marinus of Tyre compiled an extensive gazetteer and mathematically plotted world map using coordinates measured east from a prime meridian at the westernmost known land, designated the Fortunate Isles, off the coast of western Africa around the Canary or Cape Verde Islands, and measured north or south of the island of Rhodes off Asia Minor. A century later, Hipparchus of Nicaea improved on this system by determining latitude from stellar measurements rather than solar altitude and determining longitude by timings of lunar eclipses, rather than dead reckoning. The invention of a geographic coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who composed his now-lost Geography at the Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. Further information: History of geodesy, history of longitude, and history of prime meridians
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