Longitude vs Latitude

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Longitude vs Latitude
The earth’s circumference is nearly 25000 miles long, meaning roughly 40.000 km. With so many places on the earth, how is it possible to precisely locate just one of them?
For example, you want to tell a friend where the Sydney Opera House is, it would be hard to describe. But if you give him the coordinates of the opera house, he should be able to find it very quickly with just his phone. To find precise locations, lines of latitude and longitude form a x-y axis over the earth. However it is equally important to know the difference between the two.

Longitude
Lines that run north and south are called meridians of longitude and these are measured the same way as the parallels of latitude using degrees, minutes and seconds. Longitudes are not parallel – they are like the lines between sections of an orange. They all intersect at the north and south poles.

The reason they are like this has to do with time. Longitude is all about time. 0° longitude is called the prime meridian. Based at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in London, it was established by Sir George Airy in 1851 and by 1884 over two-thirds of all ship captains used it on their charts and maps.

October, 1884, was also when U.S. President Chester A. Arthur held an International Meridian Conference wherein 41 officials from 25 nations met in Washington, D.C., United States. In that conference they selected the meridian passing through Greenwich as the 0°.Only France abstained from voting and French maps continued to use the Paris meridian for several decades.

Latitude
Lines of latitude, also known as parallels circle the earth from east to west. These lines are all the same distance apart – 69 miles (111 km) and each degree of latitude is separated in smaller pieces called minutes. There are 60 minutes in one degree and likewise each minute is separated in 60 seconds.

The equator lies at 0 ° latitude, meaning halfway between the north and south poles and other important latitudes are the two topics, namely Cancer at 23.5 ° N and Capricorn at 23.5 ° S. The part of the earth that lies between these two lines is called ‘The Tropics’. The Arctic Circle lies at 66.5 ° N and the Antarctic Circle lies at 66.5 ° S.

Difference between the Two
One main difference between latitude and longitude would be their number – as opposed to 180 latitudes, longitudes are 360 in number. Another difference is the manner in which they are denoted with latitude being represented by the Greek letter phi and longitude by the Greek letter lambda.

The distance between the poles in not a complete circle but instead only requires half a circle and thus latitude has 180° across. In comparison, a longitude requires a complete circle (360°).

As you can see, both latitude and longitude have their own role and importance while living in a world that uses so much technology and global positioning systems in everyday life.