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The word “can” Is doing some heavy lifting here. I mean, there is a difference between theoretically possible and actually being done.
[PROCEEDS INTO HURRICANE]
Dexter?
Don’t the circumpolar winds essentially prevent this, or at least make it really impractical?
Sorry, can’t hear you down here in my submarine
DON’T THE CURCUMPOLAR WINDS ESSENTIALLY PREVENT THIS, OR AT LEAST MAKE IT REALLY IMPRACTICAL?
Ping.
Sailing near the south pole is not advisable, you might die. But thats also true for many other things, so whatever.
No diesel sub is going to have the range to make that trip. And NZ doesn’t allow nuclear subs in its waters.
nuclear subs are all over the place and could even be in their waters with out them realising
It’s true I’ve got all the locations of the nuclear subs right here and this conjecture is totally correct.
Lmao I do love abit of sarcasm
Yeah, sure you do.
Submarines don’t sail, they steam.
The only place you can’t sail is directly into the wind. You can go all the other places eventually but it’s a lot of back and forth.
Tacking back and forth is kinda the opposite of a straight line though, isn’t it?
All your tacks are straight, they just turn every so often. Over time that adds up to Velocity Made Good.
Now all we need is some insane person with a kayak.
I volunteer— not like you go through most dangerous sea passage in the world or anything…
Hopefully someone shares this with Geowizard, ultimate straight line challenge.
That southern ocean is brutal tho
Especially going the wrong direction!
It’d be less bad on the return trip, but then you’re fighting the trade winds and the Canary current instead.
Just rename it as Pacific Ocean and voila, no storm hence the name!
There is also a route that can be drawn from Halifax, Nova Scotia on the Canadian east coast on the Atlantic … head a bit south east and without touching land and only going over the ocean, you can end up on the west coast of British Columbia, in Canada on the Pacific coast.
I used to reference a website that showed that … but now I can’t seem to find it. :(
Another fun one is to ask someone if they were to take off in an airplane from Miami and fly due south, which South American countries would they fly over?
The answer is none of them. You end up missing the entire continent because you are too far west.
You hit Panama first, but small portions of Ecuador and Peru are west of Miami (80.2 degrees west). The broader point that South America is much farther east than many Americans think is definitely true, though.
Does work for Tampa though
I looked at that on Google Earth, now I’m uncomfortable in two directions…
I tried replicating this with Google Earth, but once you get past the halfway mark it tries to flip around and draw a line in the other direction. Guestimating it by drawing two lines seems to work ok, but I can’t find a way to avoid Australia, while shifting the start and end points between northern and southern NS and BC, and keeping the midpoint either just missing Africa or just missing Antarctica.
Even better, imho, you can sail in a direct line from OG Zeeland (Netherlands) to New Zealand.
I got this far on the Wikipedia and gave up:
On a curved surface, the concept of straight lines is replaced by a more general concept of geodesics, curves which are locally straight with respect to the surface. Geodesics on the sphere are great circles, circles whose center coincides with the center of the sphere.
I went down a rabbit hole about globes and maps recently
Basically, to find the shortest distant between two places on a globe (a ‘straight’ line), imagine a hoop or circle round the earth that cuts it exactly in half, and rotate it until it passes through both places (still cutting it exactly in half)
That’s a great circle.
There are 2d map projections that are built around this, but they only work when one of the locations is at the center of the map. So it could show the shortest distance from, say, London to anywhere with a straight line, but it wouldn’t work for a route not including London
Ah, okay that makes more sense! Thanks!
Straight line? That looks hella curved, innit? Can’t fool us with a globe. A flat map, maybe. But not a globe. Despite it being a 2D representation of a globe
If it doesn’t look right, change the way the data is presented and projected.
Comms Officer: Sirs, we still have quite a bit of time to change course.Red: But we’re going straight.
Purple: Yeah. Turning’s no fun. Why is this happening? Make it not happen.
in case there are others like me who have to see what it looks like on a Mercator projection map:
This is my new favorite globe trivia.
straight line
So the azimut you set to your compass would be a constant, right??
/s/j
It’s a geodesic; a straight line in spherical geometry.
Fun fact, the UK is about the center of the land hemisphere and new Zealand is about the center of the water hemisphere
/kyr’sɛd/?
