← Back to context

Comment by jeffhuys

21 hours ago

Pole drift.

Does it really matter if my house burns because of pole drift or because of climate change? I don't like it burning either way. So if there is something I can do against my house burning, (and I know there are things I can do against that) I will definitely try that. And I believe we agree that we could do things, right?

Magnetic, rotational, geodetic .. ?

What are you trying to say?

  • Can there even be geodetic drift of the poles? I sort of assumed that our lat/lon system is based on the poles being fixed points as a matter of definition.

    • Each ellipsoid is rigidly defined (well, some historic ones are sloppy), so WGS84 won't drift .. (that's a bold statement, is it true down to the micron and if so what are the absolute* datums to reference against?).

      That said, there are literally hundreds of historic pre WGS84 ellipsoid|datum pairings, each with a somewhat different "survey map pole".

      Historically geodectic poles have shifted as a function of datums.

      The main point here, such as it is, was to poke at the infomation free aspect of "polar drift" as a comment .. which pole and what does that have to do with climate change? etc.

      2 replies →