[imagesource: Shannon Stooksbury]

There’s really not much to know about this story that you don’t already know from the headline.

I also want to go on the record as saying this falls short of my ‘cool’ threshold, but maybe it hits your sweet spot.

Anyway, a chap called Etienne Naude, who I would guess is a 19-year-old former South African that once emigrated to New Zealand with his family, plopped a piece of white bread on the ground.

Not just any piece of ground, mind you, because he chose the spot on Auckland’s Bucklands Beach with serious precision.

On the other side of the globe in Spain, worked out using longitude and latitude measurements, another bloke was doing the same thing.

Over to the Guardian:

The two men – total strangers – had 12,724km of earth between them, creating an “earth sandwich”.

“It’s amazing that we’ve actually been able to collaborate and do something like this at exact opposite points of the globe,” Naude told RNZ.

“We made sure to get the exact location with Google Maps, to get us within a few metres range, and then we used the actual image data on Google Maps to pinpoint ourselves even closer than that.”

Naude said making an earth sandwich was a long-term goal of his, but he’d struggled to find someone on the other side of the world who was willing to lend a hand, and a slice of bread.

“It was quite hard to organise since it’s 12-hour time difference,” Naude said. “And there’s lots of things to arrange, such as the kind of bread, the time, the [precise] location.”

It appears that they went with plain white bread, which is rather insensitive towards those who are gluten intolerant.

I would have gone with sourdough – nay, rye – just to be safe.

Angel Sierra, the 34-year-old Spanish chef who completed the sandwich after travelling 11km to the exact location necessary, said he decided to get involved because “it can help to show how people can work together across the globe”.

First, earth sandwich. Second, world peace.

Cool.

[source:guardian]