Meridian which (outside of Antartica) does not cross any land.

Jonathan_Masur · 2018-01-12T08:38:09.000Z

Hello all,

From pure curiousity, I was wondering whether there is any place on earch where it is possible to go theorically from the north pole all the way south to antartica without crossing any land. Does any one know about this ? Is it possible to use OSM or Overpass-Turbo in order to determine whether such a meridian exists ?

Best regards.

alester · 2018-01-12T16:57:25.000Z

I don’t know if there’s a quick way to do it programmatically, but it seems trivial to do it just by looking at a map.

Logically, the only potential places where such a meridian could exist is either in the gap between North America and Europe/Africa, or the gap between Asia and North America. In the former, it can easily be seen that Greenland completely blocks this gap. In the latter, it at first looks like there may be a way through, but closer inspection shows that St. Lawrence Island and then Umnak Island farther south in the Aleutians block the gap exposed by the Bering Strait.

So, I would say there isn’t such a meridian. It could be an interesting exercise to determine the meridian that crosses the least amount of land, which I expect would be somewhere where it crosses Umnak Island.

Jonathan_Masur · 2018-01-12T18:31:48.000Z

It sounds about right, however I can’t be 100% that St.Lawrence and Umnak Island completely fill the gap. But yeah the chances are very low that such a meridian exists.

Find one which crosses the least amount of land is interesting, but sounds like a rather complicated problem !