“https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/09/null-island-fictional-place-created-by.html“
While the original Null Island at (0°N, 0°E) in the Gulf of Guinea is the famous grandfather of them all, cartographer Kenneth Field famously mapped out thousands of other alternate “Null Islands,” collectively referring to them as Nill Points.
Officially called GIS (Geographic Information Systems) data anomalies, these are geographic “black holes” where broken data goes to die.
Because different mapping platforms, local governments, and database software use different coordinate systems and projections, a blank or “0,0” error doesn’t always map to the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. Instead, it creates regional Null Islands all over the globe.
The Local Projections (The State Plane Nill Points)
In the United States, many local governments and surveyors don’t use the standard global system (WGS84). Instead, they use the State Plane Coordinate System (SPCS), which optimizes accuracy for a specific state or county.
When a local government database suffers a “0,0” coordinate error, the point is plotted at the (0,0) origin of that specific state’s grid. This has caused real-world chaos:
The LAPD Crime Wave (Los Angeles, California):
– When the Los Angeles Police Department launched an online crime map, the system was programmed to dump any crime with an unidentifiable address at the (0,0) origin of their local map projection. That origin happened to land right on the 200 block of West 1st Street, right around the corner from City Hall. For a long time, statistics falsely showed this single city block as one of the most dangerous, crime-ridden places in America, entirely due to “Null Island” data dumping.
The State-Specific Purgatories:
– If you look at state-level geographic data for places like Texas, New York, or Pennsylvania, you will often find an incredibly high concentration of data points (car accidents, water meters, or permits) sitting in a random, empty field or forest. This is the $(0,0)$ origin point for that state’s specific State Plane projection zone.
Web Mercator Null Island
Most modern web maps (like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenStreetMap) use a projection called Web Mercator (EPSG:3857).
While the coordinate (0,0) in Web Mercator still lands at the traditional Null Island in the Gulf of Guinea, the system measures distance in meters from the equator and prime meridian, rather than degrees. If a system mistakenly treats Web Mercator meter coordinates as standard Latitude/Longitude degrees (e.g., trying to plot a point at 5,000,000 meters East, 2,000,000 North, using standard Lat/Long coordinates), the data will warp into entirely different oceans or continents, creating accidental clusters.
The “Null Lakes” and “Null Black Holes”
When mapping software encounters a pure mathematical NULL or NaN value rather than a numerical 0, different things can happen depending on the software’s code:
The Edge of the Map:
Some software default-routes NULL values to the absolute maximum boundary of the coordinate system (e.g., 180°N, 180°E), creating a “Null Island” in the freezing Arctic Ocean or the middle of the Pacific near the International Date Line.
The Center of the Viewport:
Some poorly optimized database apps will simply drop a pin at the exact center of whatever map view the developer was looking at when they coded the application, creating localized “Null Points” right in the middle of corporate tech parks or suburbia.
