We featured the Greenwich meridian two years ago on Google Sightseeing, so it’s about time we had a closer look at the other global zero: the equator.

Although it is more than 40,000km long, there are surprisingly few towns along the line – much of its length consists of ocean, and on land it crosses large expanses of tropical rainforest.

We start our journey, appropriately enough, in the country named after its location: Ecuador. Perhaps the best known monument marking the equator is Mitad del Mundo (Middle of the World), just outside the capital, Quito. These days, GPS-laden tourists are often alarmed to find that the true zero line appears to be 240 metres north of the line on the ground.

It’s all a question of which map datum¹ you use: The Global Positioning System, along with most online maps, uses the WGS84 datum. So, in the same way that the Greenwich meridian is 100 metres or so away from GPS 0° longitude, the GPS equator (shown in red below) is somewhat north of the Mitad del Mundo line (in blue).

Just to the northeast of the offical Mitad del Mundo monument is a small private museum called Inti-Ñan, which claims to be on the “real” equator. It is, but only on an older datum called SAD69 (shown in yellow). Your GPS won’t read zero until you walk into the main road outside.

Heading eastwards through Ecuador, we soon come to the highest point on the equator, and the only place on the line with permanent snow cover: Volcán Cayambe. The summit, just inside the northern hemisphere, is 5,790 metres above sea level; the highest point on the equator itself is some 1,100 metres lower.

On the other side of South America, in the city of Macapá in Brazil, we find a football² stadium supposedly built right on the equator, with one half of the pitch in each hemisphere. This is the Estádio Milton Corrêa, better known as the Zerão (”Big Zero”), and it’s only slightly marred by the fact that the WGS84 equator actually runs just past the southern end of the pitch. A little way to the east, along Avenida Equatorial, is a monument known as Marco Zero.

Next we cross the Atlantic to Africa. A popular tourist stop in Kenya is this layby on the outskirts of Nanyuki, where a sign (arrowed) marks the location of the equator. In this case it’s pretty accurate, being just 20 metres or so south of the WGS84 line. You can usually find enterprising locals here willing, for a few shillings, to “demonstrate” how water flows down the plughole in opposite directions either side of the line. However, it’s an urban myth and the demonstration is all down to sleight of hand.

Our last location is in Indonesia, in Pontianak on the island of Borneo. Built in 1990, the Equator Monument is a replica of the marker first erected in the 1920s by Dutch surveyors. It’s five times the size of the original, but again it’s disappointing to note that it is 120 metres too far north, according to GPS.

One final Google oddity – if you search for the location “0,0″, then as you’d expect you get a placemark at the intersection of the equator and the Greenwich meridian, off the coast of west Africa. What’s more unexpected is the address that is given: 23208 Glenbrook St, St Clair Shores, Michigan. Is this unassuming neighbourhood the real centre of the universe?

Motorists taking State Route 16 through Licking County, Ohio, could be forgiven for thinking they’ve been at the wheel too long when they spot a giant shopping basket looming over the horizon.

This is no highway-induced hallucination however: it’s the headquarters of the Longaberger Company, famous for its handmade wooden baskets. Its founder, Dave Longaberger, was a man with a dream — and that dream included going to work in a seven-storey basket. When lesser men than Dave told him it couldn’t be done, he said: “If they can send a man to the moon and bring him back home, they can build a building shaped like a basket.” And he was right.

The building cost $300 million $30 million and took more than two years to build; it was completed in December 1997¹. The statistics are impressive: it takes the form of a 160:1 scale model of Longaberger’s top-selling Medium Market Basket, more than 60 m long and 30 m tall. The frame is made of steel, with a stucco finish cunningly designed to create a basket-weave effect (which also seems to confuse Street View’s face-blurring technology!) The handles are 100 metres long and weigh 75 tons each, and are even heated to prevent ice building up in winter and falling through the glass roof. (They also create a neat shadow.) On the side of the building, replicating the brass logos on the normal-sized baskets, are giant name plates weighing 340kg each and covered in gold leaf.

That’s not the only big basket in these parts, however. Over in nearby Dresden², where the Longaberger company was founded, there’s a 14-metre long picnic basket, made of real maple wood. Sadly, the imagery here is not high-enough resolution to see it in all its glory (I think this is it), but you can see pictures here. And at the Longaberger Homestead, a kitsch olde-worlde village/outlet store in Frazeysburg, there’s a giant apple basket. Again, the imagery isn’t very good here, so be sure to check out these ground-level photos (complete with giant apples!)

Read more about the creation of the Longaberger HQ at Elevator World, or visit the company website.

If you’re a nervous flier, you’d do well to avoid Luzamba airport in northern Angola¹. It’s not so much that lots of aircraft crash here (although it seems it’s hardly a rare occurence) — more the fact that the wrecked planes are simply left scattered around the place.

There are at least four: first up, at the northern end of the runway, an Air Angola Antonov An-26 which overshot the runway in February 1999, killing 2 of the 36 people on board. The International Civil Aviation Organization’s report suggests that the crew might have been drunk. There’s a ground-level photo of the wreckage on Panoramio².

At the other end of the airport, and seemingly in better shape, is a Transafrik L-100-30 Hercules (a civilan version of the C-130), which also overshot the runway later the same year. Happily, there were no casualties in this incident. Again, Panoramio features a ground-level photo, which reveals that the plane has been stripped of its engines and other salvageable parts.

In the trees to the east of the runway are another two crashed planes: one that looks almost as big as the Hercules, and another much smaller one about 50 metres away. Extensive research by Google Sightseeing (or a bit of Googling, at any rate) has failed to identify these planes, although there is a photo of one of them on Panoramio, too, and it looks as though it’s been lying there for some time. Can anyone identify it?

Lastly, it’s hard to tell from the aerial view, but could this be another piece of wreckage just on the other side of the runway from the last two planes?

Thanks to John.

It’s Island Week 4 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week.

GSS Reader Reg Coppicus from Canada thinks Isla San Felix might be “the crappiest posting ever”. Fortunately for us, he’s talking military posting – this remote island in the South Pacific, he says, is home to:

an airstrip, some sea birds and nothing else.

Come on Reg, you’re being unfair. Look – there’s plenty to keep the chaps of the Chilean Navy occupied here at the San Felix Naval Air Station, located on one of the attractively named Islas Desventuradas (Unfortunate Islands). As well as the 2km-long runway there are quite a few buildings, some roads, and best of all a tennis court, plus what looks to be some other kind of sports field¹ just to the north. Just as well, considering these rugged islands are some 900km off the coast of Chile and otherwise totally uninhabited.

Indeed, San Felix looks like a throbbing metropolis compared with tiny Malpelo Island, which belongs to Colombia although it is actually slightly closer (360km) to the coast of Panama. Malpelo appears to support just one building² – an army outpost established in 1986. Those long evenings must just fly by.

Because of the minimal human intrusion, Malpelo is an important marine reserve – the largest no-fishing zone in the tropical eastern Pacific. In 2006 it was named as a World Heritage Site by Unesco, which calls it “a ‘reservoir’ for sharks, giant grouper and billfish“. It is a popular destination with shark divers, who apparently find the prospect of immersing themselves with “aggregations of over 200 hammerhead sharks and over 1,000 silky sharks, whale sharks and tuna” appealing…

Read more about the Islas Desventuradas and Malpelo Island at Wikipedia.

Thanks to Reg Coppicus.

It’s Island Week 4 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. For about a week.

Far out in the South Atlantic, more than 2,500km from the coast of South Africa, Bouvet Island is the loneliest chunk of land on Earth. With the exception of a few tiny rocks just offshore, its nearest neighbour is Antarctica, 1,750km to the south. Despite being so remote, and totally uninhabited¹, it is covered by some beautiful high-resolution imagery.

Bouvet Island is a dependency of Norway, although it was discovered by (and named after) a Frenchman, Jean Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier, in 1739. It’s a volcanic island, almost entirely covered by snow and ice — you can make out the central crater surrounded by cloud-covered peaks, with the highest, Olavtoppen, casting a shadow from the northeast.

Landing here is a very tricky prospect, unless your ship’s equipment includes a helicopter: the coastline mainly consists of high cliffs, with stormy seas foaming at the base and carving out sheer stacks of rock. In places, glaciers tumble over the edge in jagged blocks of ice, while submerged rocks lie in wait for unwary sailors. It’s no surprise that the island remains uninhabited, although a group of hardy Norwegians did spend a whole month there in the 1920s, confirming the nation’s claim on the island.

It seems Bouvet is still volcanically active. During the 1950s, an eruption on the west coast created a low shelf of lava — just about the only convenient flat spot on the island. The Norwegian Polar Institute installed a research station there in 1994 for use during field trips to the island, but by 2007 (and on Google’s pictures) no trace of it remained. The official story is that an earthquake caused a landslide that swept the portable building away — or broke the guy lines that anchored it, allowing gales to blow it into the sea — but bearing in mind that Bouvet Island was the setting for the 2004 film Alien vs Predator, the real explanation seems obvious…

One final mystery: can anyone tell us why, according to the map at Wikipedia, this headland is called Cape Circumcision?