The most obvious inconvenience of Null Island should not be underestimated - the image of some object in the Gulf of Guinea instead of the real location. Sometimes this leads only to funny bugs in the interfaces, such as the visualization of the flight on the displays in the cabin of an airliner, when instead of New Orleans the flight departs from "Null Island". And secondly - to quite obvious fake news, as in the case of the "Chinese base on the coast of Africa". More serious cases were in 2012 in the American state of Wisconsin. After the introduction of new digital systems of population registration and vote counting, it turned out that some local residents were listed in the Atlantic instead of their hometown. It's just that the US Census Bureau did not have accurate data on their location and marked the data as missing. If the error had not been corrected in time, several thousand law-abiding Wisconsinites would have lost their right to vote in perhaps the most heated election in recent American history.
As far as we know, the virtual transfer of an object or a fragment belgium number data of data to the Gulf of Guinea has not yet caused catastrophic events. The most critical geographic information systems have several levels of data validation. But poor-quality code is becoming more widespread, and controversial management decisions are being made even in areas where unscrupulous design costs hundreds of lives (the Boeing 737 Max is a prime example). So the existence of "Island Zero" may yet resonate with humanity repeatedly if it is not taken seriously.
"Zero Island" or "Zero Lake." This map shows the datums of all coordinate systems supported by ESRI geographic information systems.
Instead of a conclusion
Describing the issues surrounding Null Island, Juhasz and Mooney do not call this phenomenon a threat to anything specific (although certain dangers are certainly associated with it, as noted above). Of particular interest to researchers is the dual status of "Null Island". On the one hand, it is an imaginary place that has no physical equivalent. On the other hand, it plays a huge role in various types of human activity and is essentially irreplaceable in the modern world. Because of this, serious disputes are even raging about whether to put it on maps at all.