Mitad del Mundo- the equator in Ecuador
Just a thirty-minute drive north from Quito, Ecuador. There is a famous developed monument straddling the position of the Earth’s equatorial “line.” Upon paying the US$5 per person fee to enter the tourist complex, complete with Ecuadorian products souvenir shops selling the same items one can by in Quito for twice the price. There is a sign by the entrance stating that the equator is not a line, but in fact is a zone 5-kilometers wide.
Huh! First time I have ever heard that, and I had university geography courses, and also know a fair amount about it, being a geologist. I studied about the geometry of the Earth, its coordinate systems and divisions.
The information sign attempts to explain this buffered wide equator zone as an effect of the Earth’s rotation, processional variations, and GPS errors, etc., but previously we had read that the marker they placed in Ecuador was indeed slightly miss-located. Therefore, it could be that providing a “fuzzy equatorial line” explanation was some local bureaucrat’s poor attempt to excuse their lack of surveying ability.
The equator is the division between the northern and southern hemisphere, the midpoint in the Earth’s shape between the poles, which were subdivided using a decimal system that accounts for a range of 90 degrees latitude from zero, the equator, to the pole. Thus, the entire range of degrees latitude from the north to south pole is 180 degrees.
Under this definition or set of geometric conditions there is absolutely no room for a varying position of the zero-degree latitude. Angular measurements do not come as plus- or minus variable numbers unless you are dealing with instrument errors in measuring or drafting.
The answer is the equator has no width, it’s a line whose position can be preciously surveyed. However, the earth axis of spin slightly drifts causing a 9-meter a year shift that is a wobble, not a systematic directional progression.
Also, keep in mind, the Earth’s circumference at the equator is 40,075 kilometers, of which approximately 21.3% falls upon landmasses. Taking out a point of this trace and erecting a monument to mark it is arbitrary. But is certainly beats trying to stop along the margin of a busy highway to take pictures of a rough road-cut as a background! So, where then does the equator exactly pass nearby Quito?
The decimal degree coordinates of the Ecuadorian monument in Google Earth is -0.002191°S, -78.455843°W. That latitude of the monument, providing that Google’s image georeferencing is completely accurate, is two thousandths of a degree south. The true position of the equator passes 245-meters north of where they built the major monument and paved the surrounding region and drew a fictional yellow line running east-west where tens of thousands of tourists pose straddling it every year.
The real position has third-world houses, yards, and open fields, but as the line runs eastward it diagonals across the Highway 28. We took pictures standing on the “equator”, but did so fully knowing that the location was probably wrong.
The tall monument adorned by a large sphere has an elevator going to the top to reach the observation deck. To descend, a series of stairs inside the structure takes one through their museum explaining the complex nature of the Earth’s geometry, but at no point in the detailed description do they confess up to the fact that the visitors are not actually on the equator line! The monument site was selected decades ago, at a time when the GPS system was not developed.
The monument location was located by Luis Tufiño, an Ecuadorian geographer, in 1936. The survey methods to determine the location were not mentioned. The site was reconstructed, in a slightly different spot, in 1979. Nearby to the massive monument we are discussing, just to the north, is the Intiñan solar museum, accessed off route 28, that has a demarked “equator line” that is closer to the mark, but still off to the south by a bit. Or you can drive route 26 out to the west to the town of Calacalí-Pichincha, and visit their plaza de armas where their central fountain lies just 11 meters north of the equator. Was this intentional or accidental?
Nonetheless, two classics, and incorrect, games to play on the equator is to run simple physical experiments that are supposedly unique to this geographic position.
The first is to have a container of water with a drain in the bottom and move this across the equator to observe the spiraling flow of water change direction from the Coriolis effect. This is occasionally demonstrated in the Ecuador site near Quito, however the forces at play are far too weak to measure within a few meters to side of the line.
The second is the balancing act that one may perform with an egg- the lore goes that only on the equator can one balance an egg on its end, instead of having it lay on its side. This is not an easy thing to do, and finding a truly flat, and smooth piece of ground around the monument is not so easy either. Others maintain one must do it on top of a nail-head.
We eventually did it, with a slight cheat of placing it on a hairline crack in the ground which seemed to help keep the egg from tipping over. We did not put that much effort into the exercise, but felt we were obligated to make the attempt.
No other visitors were out reproducing the experiment, nor were there egg vendors on hand to supply the throngs of visitors, so bring your own egg. Keep in mind, the egg trick can be performed anywhere, not just the equator.
Mitad de Mundo has it flaws. If you are purist maybe you should wander around elsewhere in Ecuador with a GPS and locate your own point along the line to take your picture. And keep in mind poor Tufiño who probably had to work a lot harder to measure where the equator lies. We wonder if he used the egg method to mark the spot!
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South America seems to refuse to show its inexhaustible creative force.
