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This may be your third. Ecuador has a city/monument running through the "Middle of the World", (the equator line as calculated by French Academy of Sciences in
by polartx 10y ago
This may be your third.
Ecuador has a city/monument running through the "Middle of the World", (the equator line as calculated by French Academy of Sciences in 1736).
As it happens, however the equator actually lies about 240 meters north of the marked line.
Having been there, its funny to see how many tourists take photos straddling the 'equator', evidently the expense of relocating the monument to the actual equator isn't viable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Mitad_del_Mundo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_Mitad_del_Mundo
- georgecmu 10y agoThis is pretty funny, especially since they had an opportunity to fix the mistake after advent of GPS. Thanks for this! As an off-topic, I actually visited Quito, but didn't know about the monument. I did, however, cross the equator on the New Year's Eve while en route between Galapagos islands. I still have the screenshot of my Android screen showing the 0º 0' 0" latitude close to midnight. A lot of my work at the time had to do with navigation and positioning; I got a kick out of the Galapagos airport code for that reason.