Geographical centre of Earth

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The geographical centre of Earth is the geometric centre of all land surfaces on Earth. In a more strict definition, it is the superficial barycenter of the mass distribution produced by treating each continent or island as a region of a thin shell of uniform density and approximating the geoid with a sphere. The centre is inside Earth but can be projected to the closest point on the surface.

History of the concept[]

In 1864, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, gave in his book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid the coordinates with

30°00′N 31°00′E / 30.000°N 31.000°E / 30.000; 31.000 (Geographical centre of all land surfaces on Earth (Smyth 1864)), the location of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.^[2][3] He stated that this had been calculated by "carefully summing up all the dry land habitable by man all the wide world over".^[2]

In October of that year, Smyth proposed to position the prime meridian at the longitude of the Great Pyramid because there it would "pass over more land than [at] any other [location]". He also argued the cultural significance of the location and its vicinity to Jerusalem. The expert committee deciding the issue, however, voted for Greenwich because "so many ships used the port of London".^[3] Referring to Smyth's book, Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard wrote in his 1884 book, The Imaginary Metrological System of the Great pyramid of Gizeh [sic], that the perfect location of the Great Pyramid along the longitudinal line could only have been purposefully done by its builders.^[4]

In the September 1919 issue of Trestle Board Magazine, Mason William Galliher stated that knowledge of the Great Pyramid being the geographical center was "determined by many years of scientific investigation" and that the Great Pyramid was likely to be the "last of the present land surface of the earth" to survive a cataclysmic event, due to its positioning.^[5]

In 1973, Andrew J. Woods, a physicist with Gulf Energy and Environmental Systems in San Diego, California, used a digital global map and calculated the coordinates on a mainframe system as

39°00′N 34°00′E / 39.000°N 34.000°E / 39.000; 34.000 (Geographical center of all land surfaces on Earth (Woods 1973)), in modern-day Turkey, near the district of Kırşehir, Kırşehir Province, approx. 1,800 km north of Giza.^[6] In 2003, a refined result was yielded by Holger Isenberg:

 WikiMiniAtlas

40°52′N 34°34′E / 40.867°N 34.567°E / 40.867; 34.567 (Mathematical World-Formula: The geographical center of Earth (Isenberg 2003)),^[7] also in Turkey, near the district of İskilip, Çorum Province, approx. 200 km northeast of Ankara. In 2016, Google Maps marked Isenberg's result of

 WikiMiniAtlas

40°52′N 34°34′E / 40.867°N 34.567°E / 40.867; 34.567 (Turkey’s Çorum as center of the Earth (Google 2016))Coordinates: 40°52′N 34°34′E / 40.867°N 34.567°E / 40.867; 34.567 (Turkey’s Çorum as center of the Earth (Google 2016)) as the geographical center of Earth. ^[8]

See also[]

• Center of the universe (disambiguation)
• Earth's inner core
• Galactic Center
• Great Attractor
• History of the center of the Universe
• Land and water hemispheres
• North Pole
• South Pole
• Sun – the center of the Solar System

References[]

External links[]

• Huber, W (17 January 2014). "What is Centroid of all lands of Earth?" [Where is the center of continental land area]. Stack Exchange. GIS.