“Australia, which rides on the world’s fastest-moving continental tectonic plate, is heading north so quickly that map co-ordinates are now out by as much as 1.5 meters (4.9 feet), say geoscientists,” Pauline Askin reports for Reuters.
“Australia’s continental tectonic plate is moving north at a rate of seven centimeters per year (almost 3 inches a year), Dan Jaksa, Australian Datum Manager at Geoscience Australia, said, and mapping systems haven’t kept pace,” Askin reports. “Maps, and the navigation systems which rely on them, are based on Australia’s position in 1994.”
Askin reports, “Jaksa and fellow scientists are now recalibrating Australia’s place on the earth’s surface. Their new calculation, called the Geocentric Datum of Australia, will be released in 2017 and plots the continent’s position down to the millimeter.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Behold the wonder of our ever-changing Mother Earth! It’ll be nice for pilots, farmers, autonomous vehicle researchers, etc. when Australia is no longer “a little off.”