Latitude and Longitude The Global Grid

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Here is a sphere.  Lets pretend this represents our planet, the Earth.   To help people determine where they are on the planet, we can create a series of imaginary lines.  These lines of latitude and longitude create something called the “Global Grid”. What does that look like?

We are going to create a very simple grid, but these can become very complex.   The first line we’re going to draw is right across the center of our circle.  This line represents the “Equator"

Now we’re going to add two more lines to this.  They are evenly spaced above and below the equator.

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And two more are drawn above that.  We have now “sliced” the globe into several different chunks.

The orange dot above represents a place on the Earth.  We want to tell someone where we live using this grid system.  We can tell them that we live right on the equator at zero degrees.  There is a lot of space inbetween however.  How do we help narrow in where exactly we are?

We can also draw lines the opposite way to help us build our global grid.

You’re at 0 degrees latitude and 30 degrees west!

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As we slice the earth this way a new system of coordinates begins to appear. How would you tell someone where to locate you on the global grid now?

To make the grid more complicated, you can “shrink” the numbers.  30 degrees is still located at the same place, but on this one we divide things by 15s rather than 30s.