Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia told the BBC: “If you want to start using driverless cars, accurate map information is fundamental”. Longitude is a geographic coordinate that specifies the east-west position of a point on the Earth’s surface; whereas latitude is a geographic coordinate that specifies the north-south position of a point on the Earth’s surface.
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Australia will adjust its latitude and longitude to put the vast country into alignment with global navigation satellite systems, a government science body said. The continent that is now shifting the most is Australia.
Australia might not be as far away as it used to be because the entire continent has moved 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) since 1994, according to Reuters.
This may not be a big deal for everyday users getting from Point A to Point B, but imagine the chaos an irregularity like this could cause in a world with self-driving cars that depend on location accuracy. Australia moves about 7 centimetres north annually due tectonic movements.
“Around the corner, in the not too distant future, we are going to have possibly driverless cars or at least autonomous vehicles where, 1.5 meters, well, you’re in the middle of the road or you’re in another lane”, Jaksa continued.
That means for three years, the new coordinates will also be slightly out of sync while the continent catches up with our updated longitude and latitude, but they’ll be a whole lot more accurate than they are now. “…so the satellite navigation systems that we all use on our smartphones is aligned with digital map information”.
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The Land Down Under is anticipating a relatively huge shift in its global coordinates as it will move 1.8 metres on New Year’s Day 2017.
