![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In the course of collecting maps for someone at work, I discovered that apparently the consensus on the border between Asia and Australia/Oceania is not entirely underwater: it runs down the middle of New Guinea.
From an article in Air and Space, I learned that airport directions are explicitly aligned to magnetic north rather than the Earth's rotational axis. Runways are numbered by their compass orientation (rounded to the nearest ten degrees, and with the final zero dropped, so one pointing due east is 9, not 90). As the magnetic north pole wanders around Ellesmere Island, runways are periodically renumbered. This simultaneously makes sense--airplanes have carried magnetic compasses for a long time--and feels deeply weird. I want "due north" to be constant. [Yes, there's some vague thought that there might have been episodes of "true polar wander" in the very deep geologic past, but most of what was thought to be polar wander turned out to have been misinterpreted plate tectonics.]
From an article in Air and Space, I learned that airport directions are explicitly aligned to magnetic north rather than the Earth's rotational axis. Runways are numbered by their compass orientation (rounded to the nearest ten degrees, and with the final zero dropped, so one pointing due east is 9, not 90). As the magnetic north pole wanders around Ellesmere Island, runways are periodically renumbered. This simultaneously makes sense--airplanes have carried magnetic compasses for a long time--and feels deeply weird. I want "due north" to be constant. [Yes, there's some vague thought that there might have been episodes of "true polar wander" in the very deep geologic past, but most of what was thought to be polar wander turned out to have been misinterpreted plate tectonics.]
Tags: