Geographers can describe the location of a place in one of two ways: absolute and relative. Both are descriptives of where a geographic location is.
Absolute location describes the location of a place based on a fixed point on earth. The most common way is to identify the location using coordinates such as latitude and longitude. Lines of longitude and latitude crisscross the earth. Latitude is used to mark the north-south position of a location on the Earth’s surface and ranges from 0 degrees at the equator to 90 degrees at the North and South Poles. There are 180 degrees of latitude and the distance between each degree of latitude is roughly 69 miles (111 km).
