Who are Rohan Chabukswar and Kushal Mukherjee? Unsuspecting researchers doing their duty. Researching.
If you were to take this map of the world and I gave you a challenge to draw the longest straight line you could and the only rule was that it could touch any of the land masses on the map, where would you draw the line?
Well, the simplest way that I would see would be to draw a line completely horizontal just south of South America. It actually looks like if you did that you could draw a continuous straight line all the way around, right? So that solves it.
Now if I were to tell you to do the same thing but now the only rule was that you could only use land and could touch water, where would it be now?
It looks simple enough. Some point up in northeastern Russia down to somewhere in Portugal or Spain, right? Or maybe you have some other ideas. Looking at this map, it look simple enough.
Well, along with the trick of the Mercator projection, which I’ve blogged about before, the earth has some other tricks up its sleeve.
What if I told you that these were the longest two straight lines that you could have in water and on land?
Your first thought? What the heck does straight mean?
Even though you may not be a flat earther, it’s still sometimes hard to wrap our minds around the idea that our world doesn’t look like it does on Google Maps. It’s a ball, because of this, what looks straight when it’s flat isn’t always the case.
Rohan Chabukswar and Kushal Mukherjee are the two researchers who finally proved once and for all that these are the two longest routes via water and land. Something that seems impossible at first glance is the absolute truth. Things are not always as they seem, even if we think we absolutely know that we know the answer.