Ninja’d by the draconian 5-minute czar. Pacific Ocean, not Indian, passing through the Bering Straits and the Drake Passage.
Hm, I found one route that takes off from roughly London, towards the Bay of Biscay, goes just west of Portugal, over Cape Verde, skirts the east side of Brazil, right over the Falklands, continues down (?) to New Zealand, more or less right over Saipan, west of Tokyo, up over Heilongjiang Province in China, through nowhere-in-particular Siberia, over Scandanavia and back to London-ish.
It looks like the highest altitude along that route is roughly 6,000 feet, somewhat in the area of Lake Baikal.
More or less approximating this line, which is 25,000 miles.
NM, Google maps won’t allow my marked route to embed. It went through London, Drake’s Passage off Cape Horn, New Zealand area, and Bering Straits.
Moderator Note
GusNSpot, if you cant’ answer a question in GQ there is really no reason for you to comment on it. This is especially true when it’s clear you didn’t really understand what the OP was asking. Let’s refrain from doing so in the future.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
In other words, the shortest route for circumnavigation would be a great circle. While you can circumnavigate the globe under some definitions without following a great circle, the OP specifically specified following a great circle. This, by definition, means no turns at all. It is a straight line along a geodesic path.
If I start at A and want to return to A, but I also want to
- circumnavigate the globe
b) follow a great circle path
iii) never change my altitude
What route should I take?
The longest water-only Great Circle is from just near Karachi, Pakistan, south through the Mozambique channel, around the southern points of Africa and South America, then northwest to the Kamchatka peninsula (which has some high mountains).
Cool, sorry…
The critical point in the definition is the antipodes, which would be the points A and B, and the Great Circle, as I said, comes into play only with reference to the route from A to B. The answer to your final question is “through B, the antipodes of A”. Once you locate that point, the great circle defines your two routes – A to B and back to A…
How is the term “great circle” throwing anyone off? That’s exactly what it means. A great circle is an undeviating line equal to the circumference of the Earth.
I think that many respondents are conflating the clearly-defined “great circle” with the navigational terms “great circle route” and “great circle path”.
Airplanes generally follow great circle routes between origin and destination but never follow the entire great circle in regular service, since that would land them back at their origin.
I, too, thought that the OP’s scenario was quite clear, but perhaps the use of “great circle route” in the first paragraph – even though the thread title had the less-ambiguous “great circle” – threw people off.
Even so, the combination of “great circle route” and “circumnavigate”, already established by post #3, ought to have cleared matters up.