What is a UK Nautical Mile?
The UK nautical mile was based on one minute of latitude, ie 1/60th of a degree. The Earth is not a perfect sphere, so a minute of latitude varies slightly with latitude, which is why a fixed length had to be chosen.
The UK nautical mile, also called the Admiralty mile, was fixed at 6,080 feet, which is 1,853.184 meters. That is 1.184 meters longer than the international nautical mile of 1,852 meters (6,076.11549 feet), which the UK adopted in 1970.
What is a meter?
The meter is the SI base unit of length and is equal to 100 centimeters or 1,000 millimeters. It was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along the meridian through Paris. Since 1983 it has been the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.