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France
Spain
Algeria
Mali
Burkina Faso
Togo
Ghana
no value
France
Spain
Algeria
Mali
Burkina Faso
Togo
Ghana
no value
"Prime Meridian is located at _______ degree meridian."
How do we establish the longitude of the Prime Meridian for bodies other than Earth?
Would it make more sense for the prime meridian to be somewhere other than Greenwich? How would you design a new system for longitude coordinates?
Why do some NATO countries not use the Prime Meridian that runs through Greenwich?
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I know that Earth's prime meridian is designed to pass through Greenwich (hence, Greenwich Mean Time). But how do we decide where to place it for coordinates on other bodies? On a surface with rotational symmetry, it doesn't seem like there's a way to do it that isn't 100% arbitrary.
Longitude measures how far east or west you are from the prime meridian (0°), all the way up to 180°. While there is a similar system for latitude, this measures how far north or south you are from the equator, which is a meaningful geographical concept (the line where the distance to the planet's North Pole is exactly the same as the distance to the planet's South Pole).
Meanwhile, for longitude, the prime meridian is where it is because in 1884, a meeting of 26 national governments agreed to standardise to Great Britain's system, where they'd decided to set the prime meridian as the north-south line passing through one of London's main astronomical observatories in Greenwich Park. Devoid of that historical explanation, there is nothing geographically significant about describing longitude in terms of how far east or west you are from a random park in the east of London.
With that in mind, acknowledging the immense practical difficulties of making any such change today, where else could the prime meridian have been set up so that coordinates tell you something more meaningful in terms of what you are east or west of? For example, would it be better to pass right through the centre of the City of London, so that longitude tells you how far east/west you are from that metropolitan hub? Of course it wouldn't have to be London - would it be more globally "useful" to measure longitude as how far east/west you are from a different city? Could it line up with a significant geographical feature, like the westernmost point of Europe (currently 9.5° W), or the easternmost point of South America (currently 34.8° W), or the southernmost point of Africa (currently 20° E)? Or how about the Diomede Islands, where Eurasia nearly meets the Americas (currently 169° W)?