What happens to Google Maps when tectonic plates move? (2020)

Fun facts I remember from looking into this in university some 9 years ago:

It’s not only the sideways movement of plates that causes a shift.

WGS 84 and other reference systems work with an underlying ellipsoid reference model. This ellipsoid is chosen to approximate the earth surface but it’s a simple shape and as such can’t account well for things like mountains and other irregularities in the shape of the earth.

Not only does that mean that your position on a mountain is less accurate, it also means that it becomes less accurate over time due to mountains growing.

These of course are tiny numbers so compared to a few cm shift of the plates it is nothing.

Another fun fact is that the ellipsoid also grows more inaccurate over time due to the earth rotating around a fixed axis.

The rotational force slowly causes the earth to flatten at the top and bottom (where the poles are) and to widen in the middle.

This too I assume is negligible

Speaking of ellipsoid, today I think it is measured via satellite. But in the past things had to be done by hand and were more local in nature. There’s a lot of history here as well since mapping has always been a very important task for governments.

So today in a lot of places a lot of data is still based on systems other than wgs84. Either because it’s historical data (e.g. property boundaries before gps was invented), or because they use a more localized reference system including a more localized ellipsoid that better matches specific country or state needs.

Perhaps one day we will use a big world wide look up table instead of a mathematical representation of the earth shape.

What I did at university was to compare a Germany-wide lookup grid with the mathematical approach of a Germany-wide reference system.

This lookup grid was created by a state agency and was more accurate because it could include more localized reference systems. In technical terms think of this as a pre calculation where each state can choose its most accurate method and then the results are put together into a country wide lookup table.

Last fun fact: The result of this comparison showed that the difference of a German-wide reference system compared to this collection of state-wide reference systems is up to four meters.

Edit: removed word inaccuracy, added difference. It’s all relative. What it mostly shows is that when working with geo data you need to know what source and what target reference systems to use. Otherwise things break

I’ll have to add this to my long list of technical problems when people request a teleporting super power.

Some related problems are the planet’s location in orbit / the solar system’s location relative to the entire universe and how landscape changes over time (trees/towns/mountains/rivers appearing and disappearing).

On another related note, it’s worth noting that the ability to pause time is a universe-ending super weapon. Even if it worked like you intended, you wouldn’t be able to use any senses or breathe without moving.

Similarly, super speed would cause every human movement to have deadly force. You would go insane from the relatively slow action of everything operating at standard speed. TV might be hours per frame instead of frames per second, with incomprehensible audio to match.

In the book Treason, the author explores that a tad: a character can make a time bubble around them, effectively freezing others. At one point, the character is being choked, freezes time, opens the assailant's hands and ducks out. When the bubble pops, in the frame of reference for the assailant, his hands moved too fast, shattering bone and destroying tissue. Read that decades ago as a kid and it was illuminating on the practical problems of time alteration

Thank you for turning me on to Atlas Obscura! I downloaded the app, and have already marked several places I want to visit, and others that I've been to. Looking forward to working with it more!

I happened to have been in Thailand recently, and came across these statues holding up traffic lights. I found it fascinating that a city council would devote resources to something like this. I'm looking forward to seeing other treasures that Atlas Obscura has.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/krabi-traffic-lights

That's gonna be a trip for archaeologists in a few thousand years.