Null Island

Today we visited Null Island. Never heard of it? Well, it doesn't exist. It was created to describe the intersection of latitude 0 and longitude 0. There is a buoy, called Soul Bouy, placed there in 2009. The previous buoy disappeared in 2008 and the current one hasn't been seen in months and hasn't sent weather data in 2 months. It is part of the PIRATA system, a set of 17 buoys installed in the tropical Atlantic Ocean since 1997 by the United States, France, and Brazil to measure weather data. Like the other buoys in the system, it is named after a musical genre.

Our ship did a repeated one mile circle around where it should be looking for it to no avail, but because we crossed 0,0 we have been inducted into the Order of the Emerald Shellback.Read more