When I was a
child, standing on the shores of a mid Atlantic beach, we use to discuss that
if we could swim straight across the ocean we would be in Russia. As I got a
bit older, we revised it to say it was more likely France. Well thanks to a map
from the Washington Post, what was across the ocean was more likely Algeria as France was considerably
north of where we were. Or is it?
Andy Woodruff took
it one step further in his post Beyond the Sea. The latitude maps got me
interested in answering the question more strictly: standing on a given point
and facing perpendicular to the coast, if you went straight ahead, never
turning, where would you end up? There are two reasons why following a line of
latitude won’t answer the question.
1.
Coastlines are crooked and wacky.
2. The
earth is round.
Now that put a whole new light on things, particularly
since I had spent some wonderful summer vacations in Ocean City, NJ. Turns out
swimming straight ahead would take me to Brazil!
So start with your favorite beach(s) and see where
swimming straight ahead takes you, using Woodruff’s map. You might be surprised
where you end up.
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