Australia Is Not as Down Under as Everyone Thinks It Is

Australia Is Not as Down Under as Everyone Thinks It Is

SYDNEY, Australia — That map of Australia you have? It’s wrong. And the whole country is going to officially relocate to correct the error.

The trouble is caused by plate tectonics, the shifting of big chunks of the earth’s surface. Australia happens to be on one of the fastest-moving pieces of all, and by geological standards it’s practically flying: about 2.7 inches northward a year, with a slight clockwise rotation as well.

People on the ground may not notice, but the Global Positioning System does. So Australia needs to adjust its longitudes and latitudes so they line up with GPS coordinates.

Four times in the last 50 years, Australia has reset the official coordinates of everything in the country to make them more accurate, correcting for other sources of error as well as continental drift. The last adjustment, in 1994, was a doozy: about 656 feet, enough to give the delivery driver an alibi for ringing your neighbor’s doorbell instead of yours.

“You might think, ‘Where’s my pizza?’” said Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia, the government agency that worries about the coordinates. But something bigger is at stake, he said: intelligent transportation systems that rely on the finer accuracy that will come with the next generation of GPS technology.

The next adjustment, due at the end of the year, will be about 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) — not really enough of a discrepancy to throw off consumer-grade satellite navigation systems, which are generally accurate only to within 15 to 30 feet.

But the next generation of GPS devices, using both satellites and ground stations, will be accurate to within an inch or less, and new technologies that depend on precise location will be important to Australia’s future.

The mining company Rio Tinto already has 71 immense ore trucks rumbling around iron mines in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia that are guided remotely from an office in Perth, 930 miles away.

Pilots who patrol the Anna Creek cattle ranch in South Australia must pick out small water bores in the ranch’s 8,880 square miles of dry pasture, an area larger than Israel, where small errors can equate to big misses. “If we get a new pilot, he’s relying on GPS until he finds his way around landmarks,” said the ranch manager, Norm Sims.

Not to mention driverless cars. “If you’re 1.5 meters out,” Mr. Jaksa said, “you’re potentially on the wrong side of the road.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/24/world/what-in-the-world/australia-continental-drift-location-gps.html?WT.mc_id=2016-KWP-MOBILE-INTL_AUD_DEV&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=IntlAudDev&kwp_0=244720



That's amazing!! Anyone heard of this? I find this so fascinating.

Your country has slipped so far away that I can hardly hear you....

actually we're getting closer


P.S. that means these guys are too

it is an interesting article.
interesting to think about how we build for 'constants' that are not really so constant.
also how silly it is to think the lines on the map matter, they matter to no one but the raving mad monkey that is us.

WHY did you feel the need to bring spiders to this thread? If your big fat hairy spiders come here I am leaving.

Dont worry Eddie...if they keep drifting in the direction they are they will end up joining china...which will make veya very happy and he can become a sad little commie.........making rubbish computer programs to go in rubbish computer clones for a bowl of rice and a cup of birdsnest soup a day......

Meow. Want some cream for that bite you got going on?

it may have escaped your attention...but Victor is "on one"...No-one....is safe.....

Lord Foul wrote:it may have escaped your attention...but Victor is "on one"...No-one....is safe.....

You don't scare me mate.

Lord Foul wrote:Dont worry Eddie...if they keep drifting in the direction they are they will end up joining china...which will make veya very happy and he can become a sad little commie.........making rubbish computer programs to go in rubbish computer clones for a bowl of rice and a cup of birdsnest soup a day......

better than you lot 

the direction the British are taking is backwards

Considering that the Australasian tectonic plate is slowly drifting northwards at the rate of a few centrimetres a year, it will conceivably be a few million years yet before we sideswipe China while heading for Vladivostok...

First of all, we should see New Guinea and the Solomons crashing on through Indonesia, taking it's long overdue revenge for the Indonesian invasian of Irian Jaya/West Papua some four decades ago..

By the time that Australia actually contacts China, their communist government will be long gone, merely their forgotten relics being rediscovered by those Orangutan archeaologists digging their way through dusty old ruins.      

thing is wolfie...by that time...will you and veya have actually finished your first independant thought...or will it still be percolating the solidity that exists twixt your ears??

Lord Foul wrote:thing is wolfie...by that time...will you and veya have actually finished your first independant thought...or will it still be percolating the solidity that exists twixt your ears??

the mass between our ears seems to be doing better than the Hot gases between yours

only in YOUR opinion....


FGS some one ...save china...torpedo that wayward continent