The blue pixels at top of texture suppose on the North pole, but move to the South. It seems the poles have swapped the pixels of top and bottom of texture.
not sure how it would have happened, but a quick fix may be to mirror the tiles of the texture; to use an example, here is a sphere with uvs planar projected a bit too short in the y axis
now enable mirror
the real fix should be to find out why the unwrapping appears to have been similarly too “short”, wrapping V around at the poles, yielding some values of 1 at the extreme top, and 0 at the extreme bottom of the mesh
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