Comment by avianlyric
Comment by avianlyric 19 hours ago
We still use many of those old ellipsis and datum’s today. When you’re doing human things, like surveying land, and defining property boundaries. It’s nice to work with a coordinate system which remains fixed relative to the area you’re surveying, and doesn’t drift due to annoying things like tectonic movement, or your entire country slowly tipping into the ocean.
FWiW I'm old enough to have navigated via LORAN and travelled through over two thirds of the 190+ countries on the planet tying in multitudes of old datums to the "new" WGS84 standard as part of a career in geophysical surveying (Gravimetrics, tides, magnetics, radiometrics, EM, etc.)
I'm not old enough to have seen Great Britain and relate isles pressed down by the weight of kilometres of ice though .. that'd be a great great great grand something that saw that.