Читать книгу Geography For Dummies - Jerry T. Mitchell - Страница 46

IN THIS CHAPTER

Getting it right with a grid

Pointing someone in the right direction

Discovering a common theme: Degrees, minutes, and seconds

Locating a street address and global address

Back in 1992, a cargo ship lost a container and launched almost 29,000 bath toys into the northern Pacific Ocean. Plastic beavers, frogs, turtles, and ducks, all bobbing along, wave after wave. Dubbed “the Friendly Floatees,” these plastic toys — cute as they were — added to a growing ocean pollution problem. But they had one useful benefit, and that was to help model ocean currents.

As the toys washed ashore or were seen at sea, a very useful piece of information was collected: their location. To relay that information to others, humans have devised a number of ways to express location on Earth’s surface. In this case, the ducks and their friends were identified using latitude and longitude, a set of invisible lines and coordinates that describe where things are.

But how does this imaginary system work? Let’s visit Gridville to find out.