Four corners no longer square with modern survey methods - April 22, 2009
Tourists may need to stretch their arms and legs at little further to straddle Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah all at once. A report in the Deseret News claims that modern surveys put the US monument marking the geographical union of the four western states in the wrong place.
The error is due to subtle effects such as imperfect bulges on the Earth's surface which were difficult to incorporate in 1868, when the US government first surveyed the site, the chief geodetic surveyor for the National Geodetic Survey told Colorado's Channel 9 news:
"The 2.5 mile discrepancy that was originally reported is not accurate... At most, the difference between the location of the monument and where the actual four states should meet geographically is approximately 1,800 feet."
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Comments
Whether "modern survey methods" are more precise or point to a location somewhere else has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the true location of the corner of the four states. The original monument established by the Government surveyors is the corner and always will be (February 11, 1805 Act of Congress (2 Stat. 313).
Posted by: Gregory C. Spies, Esq. | April 22, 2009 07:45 PM