Cruise Ships Navigate to Null Island, a Ghost Destination Born From Mapping Errors

No terra firma awaits at the crossing of the equator and the prime meridian — only open ocean, a GPS countdown, and the quiet revelation that a place can become real through collective imagination alone. Null Island, born around 2008 from the habit of mapping software to deposit broken data at coordinates 0,0, migrated from a geospatial inside joke into internet mythology and has now arrived, improbably, on cruise ship itineraries. It joins a long lineage of phantom geographies — Atlantis, Antillia, Agloe — reminding us that the human need to mark, name, and visit a place can conjure destinati