Lines of Latitude

Last updated: January 27, 2018 at 16:50 pm

latitude photoAs you may have learned, our earth is a globe. And no, it is not flat, just in case you’ve been watching some of those flat earth videos!

Lines of latitude helps us to pinpoint locations on our earth with…well…pinpoint accuracy. They are lines which go around the earth “horizontally.” That is, they run parallel to the earth’s equator.

But lines of latitude are not really there. We make them up. They are imaginary. We draw these lines on our maps and models of the earth, and we imagine them to be there for geographic purposes.

Lines of latitude run east-west, while another set of imaginary lines, lines of longitude, run north to south on the globe earth model.

There are a total of 180 lines of latitude on the globe earth model, each one representing one degree. The distance between each line or degree of latitude is 69 miles or 110 kilometers.  For example, a spot 110 kilometers above the equator on globe earth model falls on the first line of latitude and may be read as 1 degree north of the equator.

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