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Comment by sorz

9 hours ago

So gound stations need keep measuring their own positions due to continental drift! Never thought that before. Thanks.

It's quite fun area, I used to work in related technologies. Some of the countries maintain their own networks, but there are also commercial networks - so called reference stations that provide RTK/Network-RTK, basically your GPS can be augmented with a model based on those reference stations (which are ground GPS/GNSS receivers with very well known position) and improve accuracy to even 1cm (based on differences from your GPS position vs positions in network compared to well known positions).

And this precision data can then in turn be used to map localized terrain movements due to volcanic activity, mining etc. using high precision GPS. I think some of these can detect (in the long term) movements of as little as a few millimeters!