Australia’s continental tectonic plate is moving north at a rate of seven centimeters per year (almost 3 inches a year), Jaksa said, and mapping systems haven’t kept pace.
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Global Positioning System has become an incredibly useful tool when navigating all around the world, but people in Australia who frequently use mapping apps may have noticed that their destination is always a bit. off.
Right now, digital maps know where a country is supposed to be based on detailed coordinates supplied by the government.
Well, not if you’re a passenger in a driverless auto. Australian GPS was last updated in 1994, and the entire country has moved a little more than five feet since then.
The issue wasn’t always a major one, but the shift means those who use GPS systems in Australia have been wondering why their destinations aren’t accurate. “We have tractors in Australia starting to go around farms without a driver, and if the information about the farm doesn’t line up with the co-ordinates coming out of the navigation system there will be problems”.
While that might not seem like much, various new technology requires location data to be pinpoint accurate.
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New data on Australia’s updated coordinates is expected to appear in January 2017. “So the map information those systems use need to be coincident with the [navigation] system they’re using which is GPS”. The GDA is also looking on to how they can keep the numbers more up to date in the future. Jaksa said that the lines are fixed to the continent but as time goes by, its position compared to a GPS position can create a difference, so it needs to be changed every so often, Sputnik News reported. But, as the tectonic plates of the Earth shift and move, those latitude and longitude coordinates become ever so slightly incorrect each year (we’re talking by a matter of centimetres) but they add up over time.
