FE Meme
North-South Circumnavigation Done Zero Times?
#2: East–west circumnavigation has been done millions of times; north–south circumnavigation has been done zero times, so the globe story does not add up.
The Meme
Split layout: two globes with yellow E–W and N–S arrows, shock-face reaction image on the right. Macro typography on black.
Why It Spreads
The shock-face panel and bold tally frame circumnavigation as a scoreboard: millions east-west versus zero north-south. Most people picture sailing the equator or familiar airline loops, so the meme's north-south count sounds like a knockout statistic before anyone recalls polar expeditions, ice crossings, or transpolar flights.
What It Gets Wrong
The meme quietly redefines circumnavigation to mean only equatorial loops, then pairs that tally with a shock-face reaction image instead of documented polar routes. Amundsen reached the South Pole in 1911, Peary's party reported the North Pole in 1909, and modern teams have crossed Antarctica overland and by air, all on a sphere with roughly 40000 km equatorial circumference where a pole-to-pole meridian is a valid axis. Transpolar great-circle airline routes save hundreds of kilometres on that geometry, which fits published flight paths and is inconsistent with a flat map that needs ad hoc corrections. TestTheGlobe's Antarctica Is An Ice Wall and TestTheGlobe's Flight Path Comparison walk through the observations and predictions this image skips.
The Debunk
Documented polar expeditions and transpolar airline routes fit a spherical Earth model; the "zero times" north-south tally is inconsistent with counted achievements. Great-circle routing on a globe predicts shorter polar paths that airlines actually fly. Use TestTheGlobe's Flight Path Comparison to compare the meme's claim with a measurable prediction.
- TestTheGlobe's Antarctica Is An Ice Wall: Amundsen's 1911 South Pole march and modern Antarctic supply traverses cross the southern continent on a globe, not along an uncrossable disk rim.
- Commercial and military aircraft publish transpolar great-circle routes because they save distance on a sphere; TestTheGlobe's Flight Path Comparison plots those arcs against flat-map distortions.
- TestTheGlobe's Circumnavigating Antarctica On A Globe explains how vessels loop the continent at high southern latitude, a route the flat tally ignores when it claims zero north-south circumnavigations.
- TestTheGlobe's Southern Flight Time Check compares scheduled durations on southern routes; measured block times fit spherical geometry, not a flat map with ad hoc corrections.