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"Prime Meridian."
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Zero degrees : geographies of the Prime Meridian
Space and time on earth are regulated by the Prime Meridian, 0ہ, which is, by convention, based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. But the meridian's location in southeast London is not a simple legacy of Britain's imperial past. Before the nineteenth century, more than twenty-five different prime meridians were in use around the world, including Paris, Beijing, Greenwich, Washington, and the location traditional in Europe since Ptolemy, the Canary Islands. Charles Withers explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0ہ longitude solved complex problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times. Withers guides readers through the navigation and astronomy associated with diverse meridians and explains the problems that these cartographic lines both solved and created. He shows that as science and commerce became more global and as railway and telegraph networks tied the world closer together, the multiplicity of prime meridians led to ever greater confusion in the coordination of time and the geographical division of space. After a series of international scientific meetings, notably the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC, Greenwich emerged as the most pragmatic choice for a global prime meridian, though not unanimously or without acrimony. Even after 1884, other prime meridians remained in use for decades. As Zero Degrees shows, geographies of the prime meridian are a testament to the power of maps, the challenges of accurate measurement on a global scale, and the role of scientific authority in creating the modern world.-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Why the Greenwich meridian moved
In 1884, the International Meridian Conference recommended that the prime meridian “to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard of time-reckoning throughout the globe” pass through the “centre of the transit instrument at the Observatory of Greenwich”. Today, tourists visiting its meridian line must walk east approximately 102 m before their satellite-navigation receivers indicate zero longitude. This offset can be accounted for by the difference between astronomical and geodetic coordinates—deflection of the vertical—in the east–west direction at Greenwich, and the imposed condition of continuity in astronomical time. The coordinates of satellite-navigation receivers are provided in reference frames that are related to the geocentric reference frame introduced by the
Bureau International de l’Heure
(BIH) in 1984. This BIH Terrestrial System provided the basis for orientation of subsequent geocentric reference frames, including all realizations of the World Geodetic System 1984 and the International Terrestrial Reference Frame. Despite the lateral offset of the original and current zero-longitude lines at Greenwich, the orientation of the meridian plane used to measure Universal Time has remained essentially unchanged.
Journal Article
Earth's hemispheres
The division of the Earth into hemispheres isn t the easiest concept to teach or grasp. It involves geography, spatial awareness, map-reading abilities, and more. This volume makes it easy for any reader to develop a solid comprehension of this critical social studies lesson! Vivid, full-color maps and photographs are integrated with accessible main text to aid young readers understanding of this sometimes-tough topic. This essential book is a useful and valuable addition to any library s collection!
Book
Comparison of Mars rotation angle models
We compare published solutions for the rotation angle W(t) which describes the location of the prime meridian of Mars with respect to the ICRF equator in IAU recommendations. If the model for W includes a very long period term, we transform it into a quadratic polynomial with updated epoch value and rate, resulting in a difference in the mean epoch value up to 200 km. The mean and true epoch rotation angles are about 800 mas (13 m) apart in J2000 and should not be confused with each other in order to accurately locate the prime meridian. We identify two groups of radio-science solutions for W, which can be distinguished by the prime meridian location they used as a priori that differ from each other by about 100 m at J2000.
Journal Article
Variability of nutrients and carbon dioxide in the Antarctic Intermediate Water between 1990 and 2014
Antarctic Intermediate Water (AAIW) formation constitutes an important mechanism for the export of macronutrients out of the Southern Ocean that fuels primary production in low latitudes. We used quality-controlled gridded data from five hydrographic cruises between 1990 and 2014 to examine decadal variability in nutrients and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) in the AAIW (neutral density range 27 < γn < 27.4) along the Prime Meridian. Significant positive trends were found in DIC (0.70 ± 0.4 μmol kg− 1 year− 1) and nitrate (0.08 ± 0.06 μ mol kg− 1 year− 1) along with decreasing trends in temperature (− 0.015 ± 0.01∘C year− 1) and salinity (− 0.003 ± 0.002 year− 1) in the AAIW. Accompanying this is an increase in apparent oxygen utilization (AOU, 0.16 ± 0.07 μ mol kg− 1 year− 1). We estimated that 75% of the DIC change has an anthropogenic origin. The remainder of the trends support a scenario of a strengthening of the upper-ocean overturning circulation in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean in response to the positive trend in the Southern Annular Mode. A decrease in net primary productivity (more nutrients unutilized) in the source waters of the AAIW could have contributed as well but cannot fully explain all observed changes.
Journal Article
Evolution of longitude description system. Example of Polish school geographical atlases (1771–2012)
The evolution of the mathematical foundations of maps in school geographical atlases, especially in 19th and 20th century, was one of the elements of the perception of progress in cartography by the didactics of geography. The biggest changes, ongoing also today, concerned cartographic projections used to maps design.
The evolution of the geographical coordinate system is a part of this process and the basis of the theory of cartographic projections. In the paper there are described changes concerning the location of the Prime Meridian and the method of the description of longitude – elements necessary for the construction of the grid of meridians and parallels. These changes are presented on the basis of analysis of 665 atlases, what means all editions of Polish school geographical atlases between 1771 and 2012 identified by the author.
The evolution of the mathematical foundations of maps in Polish school atlases over more than two centuries is an example of assimilation of the newest trends and scientific researches that takes place between science and education.
Journal Article
The cosmic time of empire
Combining original historical research with literary analysis, Adam Barrows takes a provocative look at the creation of world standard time in 1884 and rethinks the significance of this remarkable moment in modernism for both the processes of imperialism and for modern literature. As representatives from twenty-four nations argued over adopting the Prime Meridian, and thereby measuring time in relation to Greenwich, England, writers began experimenting with new ways of representing human temporality. Barrows finds this experimentation in works as varied as Victorian adventure novels, high modernist texts, and South Asian novels—including the work of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, H. Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and Joseph Conrad. Demonstrating the investment of modernist writing in the problems of geopolitics and in the public discourse of time, Barrows argues that it is possible, and productive, to rethink the politics of modernism through the politics of time.
eBook
Mathematics in India
Based on extensive research in Sanskrit sources, Mathematics in India chronicles the development of mathematical techniques and texts in South Asia from antiquity to the early modern period. Kim Plofker reexamines the few facts about Indian mathematics that have become common knowledge--such as the Indian origin of Arabic numerals--and she sets them in a larger textual and cultural framework. The book details aspects of the subject that have been largely passed over in the past, including the relationships between Indian mathematics and astronomy, and their cross-fertilizations with Islamic scientific traditions. Plofker shows that Indian mathematics appears not as a disconnected set of discoveries, but as a lively, diverse, yet strongly unified discipline, intimately linked to other Indian forms of learning.
eBook
Postcolonial Mappae Mundi
The second chapter of Wilson Harris’s phantasmagorical novel Palace of the Peacock opens with an arresting passage that foregrounds the narrator’s sense of the tensions inherent in the way place has been inscribed on the space that is familiar to him. He writes, ‘The map of the savannahs was a dream. The names Brazil and Guiana were colonial conventions I had known from childhood’ (Harris 1968, p. 20) and he goes on to expand on the role played by colonial cartographies by saying:
Book Chapter
The Longitude Committee and the Practice of Navigation in the Netherlands, c. 1750–1850
In 1826, the Netherlands switched meridians. Officially, the meridian of Greenwich became the prime meridian for Dutch seafarers rather than that of Tenerife. The shift was the result of advice from the Longitude Committee to the Secretary of the Navy. The Committee, which the Admiralty of Amsterdam originally established in 1787 as the ‘Committee concerning matters relating to the determination of Longitude at Sea and the Improvement of Charts’,1 argued that other seafaring nations no longer used the meridian of Tenerife as their reference and that Dutch seafarers also rarely used it as a prime meridian. Naval officers had already switched to the Greenwich meridian because they often used British charts.
Book Chapter