After driving until the road ends and then hiking for hours, you arrive at your goal. Are you atop a mountain peak, at a cave’s entrance, or at a rare fossil dig? No, you’re at a degree confluence point. There is no band, victory tape, not even a marker.
After driving until the road ends and then hiking for hours, you arrive at your goal. Are you atop a mountain peak, at a cave’s entrance, or at a rare fossil dig? No, you’re at a degree confluence point. There is no band, victory tape, not even a marker. You are likely to be standing in a field alongside some bored-looking cows. But you are on a unique spotwhere a line of latitude and longitude intersect. Through the Degree Confluence Project (DCP), (www.confluence.org) people around the world journey to these points and document what is there. Through their efforts, we have a true picture of what our planet is like through thousands of sample points in a regularly spaced grid.
Exploring Earth, One Degree at a Time
By the 21st Century, humans had explored just about every conceivable place. Yet the spirit of discovery is far from dead, and journeying to latitude-longitude intersections is a perfect example. To be "on point" means within 100 meters for the visit to be considered complete. A visitor to 70° North Latitude, 29° East Longitude stood on the shoreline 110 meters away, gazing across a chilly Norway fjord. The visit was listed as incomplete, prompting the next visitor to swim to it using a wet suit!
Confluence hunting fits squarely within GPS-based hobbies, such as geocaching, earthcaching, geodashing, and those who seek boundary corners and triangulation stations, yet is different from all of them. First, the points are fewer in number, and many are difficult to reach, are dangerous, or are on restricted lands. While geocaching.com listed 260,000 visits by nearly 40,000 visitors in one week in December 2007, over the past 15 years, 11,000 visitors have journeyed to about 6,000 confluence points. Second, confluence hunting is primarily a scientific, not a recreational, endeavor.
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