Australia Moved Six Feet in 26 Years; NSW and Victoria Maps Updated with New GPS Coordinates
Chocolate writes:
According to Boing Boing, Australia's location corrected:
Australia sits on a fast-moving tectonic plate and is drifting north several inches a year. As its GPS coordinates haven't been updated since 1994, the discrepancy has grown to six feet and has begun causing trouble. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the continent's location is being fixed.
That report, "NSW and Victoria just jumped 1.8 metres north" reports:
The change is being made to fix a 1.8 metre inaccuracy that has crept into our GPS coordinates, caused by Australia slowly drifting north.
[...]Australia sits atop one of the fastest-moving tectonic plates in the world. We move about seven centimetres north-east every year.
[...]In the days of paper maps our tectonic drift did not pose a real problem. The continent might move but the distance from Melbourne to Sydney stayed the same. That meant Australia could get away with the slight inaccuracy that has crept in since we last set our coordinates in 1994.
[...]Because Australia's underlying map data is now off by about 1.8 metres, it throws off the accuracy of the GPS location. The blue dot is accurate, but the underlying map is not.
"Effectively the coordinate you have from your GPS has already moved the 1.8 metres - it's the mapping data that has been left behind," says Dr John Dawson, director of positioning at Geoscience Australia, the federal government department supervising the fix.
The governments of New South Wales and of Victoria updated their map data on January 1. All Australian states and territories expect to have their coordinates updated by June.
Help, my country is trying to escape.
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