Random location generator – a random place on Earth

A random location sounds simple: pick a random latitude between −90 and 90 and a random longitude between −180 and 180. But that gives far too many points near the poles, because the lines of longitude run together there: the strip north of 80° gets one point in eighteen, although it covers less than 1 % of the Earth. This generator draws points evenly by area on the WGS84 ellipsoid instead, the same model of the Earth that GPS uses, so a square kilometre in Siberia is exactly as likely as one in the Sahara. You decide where the points may fall: anywhere on land, anywhere on Earth, only at sea, inside one country or within a radius of a town or a point you click. Each point comes with its coordinates, the country it lies in and the nearest town from the GeoNames list, with the distance. You can draw one place for a game, a trip or a writing prompt, or up to 1,000 points for a field survey, a test data set or a sampling plan, and download them for Google Earth, QGIS or a spreadsheet. Every draw has a short seed in the link, so whoever opens it sees exactly the same points.

How to use it

1. Choose where the points may fall – anywhere on land, the whole Earth, only at sea, one country or within a radius – and, for a radius, search a town or click the map for the centre and type the radius.
2. Set how many points you want, from 1 to 1,000.
3. Press "Generate random location" to see the point or points on the map with their coordinates, country and nearest town.
4. Press the button again for new points, copy the coordinates, share the link with the same points or download CSV, KML or GeoJSON.

How accurate is it?

Evenly spread by area, not by degrees

A degree of longitude shrinks from 111 km at the equator to nothing at the poles, so a 1° × 1° cell at 80° latitude is only 17 % of the area of one at the equator. Picking latitude and longitude uniformly therefore puts 5.6 % of all points north of 80°, where only 0.77 % of the Earth's surface lies. Here the sine of the equal-area (authalic) latitude of the WGS84 ellipsoid is uniform, which makes every square kilometre equally likely; the test suite checks this against the ellipsoid's own band areas with 200,000 points.

How exact land, sea and borders are

Land, sea and countries come from the Natural Earth 1:50 million outlines. Coasts and borders there are smoothed to about 1–3 km, so a point a few hundred metres from a coast or a border can be on the other side in reality, and small islands under a few square kilometres are missing. In these outlines land covers 28.7 % of the Earth; Antarctica is 8.6 % of that land and is left out unless you tick "Include Antarctica".

Within a radius

The radius is a geodesic distance on the ellipsoid, the same as on the radius map: every point is at most the radius from the centre, measured along the surface, and the points are spread evenly over the disc, so a quarter of them lie within half the radius. The distance to the nearest town is geodesic too, to the town's GeoNames point, which is usually the centre, not its edge.

Good to know

A random point is often nowhere

Seven of ten points on the whole Earth fall in the sea, and many points on land fall in the Sahara, the Arctic, the Australian outback or the Siberian taiga. That is what an even spread over the area means. For a place people live, choose a country or a radius around a town; the nearest town shows how remote a point is.

A point is not a place you may visit

The coordinates can land on private property, a military area, a nature reserve, a motorway or a lake. Look at the point on the map or in satellite images before you go there, and follow local rules.

Random is not the same as evenly spaced

Independent random points cluster and leave gaps by chance; with 10 points in a field, two may be close together. For a survey that must cover an area, use more points or a regular grid; for statistics that need an equal chance for every square metre, random points are exactly right.