How would the world look like if you were standing on an arbitrary point on earth? It is not easy to imagine, how a randomly chosen location would look like since most pictures that come into our mind are somewhat special: our home, Piccadilly Square, a picture from National Geographic, or a photo that had been taken on top of a famous summit.

In order to get an unbiased view of the world the following attempt is being made: each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world are visited, pictures are taken at each location, stories about the visits are collected and posted at a website. Altogether there are 64,442 intersections – let us call them “degree confluences” since these are the meeting places of latitude and longitude degree lines. 21,543 confluences – almost exactly one third (33.4%) are on land. Ignoring those confluences without view of land and after thinning out the poles region which has an impropriate density of degree intersections, still 16,194 confluences are considered as worthwhile visiting – in the following denoted as “primary confluences”.

Figure 1:Total number of degree confluence point visits for each month since 1996. The upper curve shows all visits, the lower curve only first successful visits to primary confluences.

Standing on any point on Earth, there is always one confluence within 79 km radius. Typically, confluences are about 100 km apart. Using the WGS84 system that includes the mathematical GRS80 ellipsoidal model of the Earth we find that the distance between degrees of latitude varies from 110.57 km at the equator to 111.69 km near the poles. The distances between longitude lines continuously decrease from 111.32 km at the equator towards the poles. However, the locations are reasonably well equidistributed for representing the earth, but also creating a huge task for reaching them. This is in particular the case, because the confluence locations go against all human infrastructures.

The pictures and stories are collected at the project website www.confluence.org. One of the project’s principles is to keep the confluence points as they are. Any changes made by visitors – e.g. leaving souvenirs, or even placing markers, sign posts, cairns is considered as polluting of the confluence and visitors are encouraged to follow the policy “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints”.

It all began in February 1996 when the US-American citizen Alex Jarrett used his new hand-held GPS receiver in order to reach the nondescript location 43°00’00”N 72°00’00”W. After bicycling 16 km and a bit of a hike he was able to exactly locate and document the spot. An then he posted his pictures of the confluence to a website that showed some snow covered trees of New Hampshire’s winter. From there snowballing began. Alex visited another confluence in May of the same year, in the following year the number of visits doubled to 4. Other people joint the project quadrupling the number of visits each year, so that in 2001 the
Figure 2: total number of confluence visits for each calendar month in red. Visits occurred on the northern hemisphere are in black.


Figure 3: Fraction of first visits to primary confluences.

tremendous number of 1513 postings had been reached. Since then, progress continued at a constant rate between 1000 and 2000 postings each year. Figure 1 shows that the total number of confluence visits each month has been approximately at a constant level for the last 6 years. Clearly, there is an obvious yearly cycle with a summer-peak and a winter low. Figure 2 verifies the tendency to visit confluences in summer is twice as high as in winter. Apparently the northern hemisphere with its Lion’s share of confluences attracts more confluence hunters – causing a summer peak.