RELIEF - Maphead - page 167

Chapter 12
RELIEF
n. : differences in elevation on the Earth's surface,
as represented on a map by contours or shading
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. ELIOT
M ycellphoneringsasI'msittingwithsomefriends,waitingforaconcerttostart.“Ken,
this is Rodger. You left a message for me last week?”
“Right! Rodger! Thanks forcalling me back. Yourneighbor Kathy gave me yournumber.
Ihopethat'sokay.”Itakeadeepbreath,becausewhatI'mabouttosaynextisdeeplyweird.
“Did you know that there's an integer degree confluence at the end of your driveway?”
A long pause. “There's a what in my driveway?”
The Degree Confluence Project wasstarted in1996byaMassachusetts Webprogrammer
named Alex Jarrett, a new GPS owner who noticed that his commute happened to take him
across the nearby seventy-second meridian twice a day. The mathematical perfection of that
line of longitude—seventy-two degrees west, no minutes, no seconds—sang to him like a
row of zeroes on a rolling-over odometer. He and a friend biked ten miles to get to the point
where the seventy-second meridian crossed their closest parallel, forty-three degrees north.
The intersection turned out to be a nondescript spot of snowy woods next to a swamp. “ We
keptexpecting theretobeamonumentatanylocationsaying'43N/72W'butnosuchluck,”
Alex wrote on his website, where he posted pictures of the momentous expedition.
Ifyouthink about it, that very lack ofa monument was what turned “confluence hunting”
into a popular pastime, first for Jarrett and his friends and family and then for thousands
of geography geeks who stumbled across his project on the Internet. There's no National
Geodetic Survey benchmark in the ground to identify these integer confluences, and that
means nobody's ever found them before . There are 16,340 “confluence points” worldwide, *
andeachonerepresentsachancetoplantaflagliketheexplorersofold. Confluencehunters
have dutifully braved army ants in the jungles of Ghana, leeches in Malaysian swamps, and
armed nomads in the Algerian Sahara in pursuit of their quixotic goal, but there are still
more than ten thousand primary confluences yet to be visited worldwide.
But not every confluence hunt need turn into an Indiana Jones adventure; in fact, no spot
on Earth is more than forty-nine miles from one of these points of cartographic perfection. I