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Sampling the world
Rainer Mautz |
This article describes an ongoing project that has the goal to visit the degree intersections of
each latitude and longitude on land, or within sight of land, around the world documenting the
visit with photographs at each location and publish them on the Degree Confluence website |
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Picture 1: 47°s 168°e stewart Island, new Zealand:
we advanced only 3km a day through dense primary
forest and had to return 3km from the target.
Why do visitors give up? The reported
motives for incomplete visits are given
in Figure 11. This survey shows that
difficult terrain is the main reason for
capitulation (29%), in particular dense vegetation, slopes
and rocks prevent
explorers to reach
their goals. Another
Picture 2: 47°n 9°e Glarus, switzerland: the
confluence is located right on the top of a mountain
rage at 2915m altitude. 90m from the point I
considered further climbing as being too unsafe.
Picture 3: 42°n 60°e da oguz, turkmenistan: 2.5 km
from the point I realised that the target is not located in
Uzbekistan but in turkmenistan. the trip ended at the border
fence. Further advance was too risky without a proper visa.
18% fail to submit
their visit correctly.
13% get into time
trouble, 11% don’t get
permission to access
the confluence, 6%
seem just not serious
about their attempt and
the rest is caused by
weather conditions,
technical problems and
dangers. Consequently,
disappointment can be avoided
observing the following rules:
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- Study land use and topography.
Determine distance from the nearest
town, road, track and trail.
- Study the submission requirements
at the confluence website.
- If your map shows
your confluence being
located in the water, organise
your ship prior to arrival,
successful swims (see 55°N
24°E) are rare exceptions.
- Be an early bird – you
may run out of daylight as it
always takes longer as expected.
- Bring a printed
letter informing landowners
about the project – authorities
prefer printed matters.
- Check the weather
forecast. Flooding, ice and
heat are the major reason
for disappointment.
- Bring a residual
camera and GPS receiver
including spare batteries.
Heat, dust, salt, humidity
and ice increase the chance
of a technical problem.
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Picture 1-4 show the author’s
unsuccessful attempts of
reaching confluence points
in various countries. 
Picture 4: 44°n 91°e Xinjiang, china: 11km from
the objective the rear bicycle rack broke.
When will the project
get finished?
At the time of writing 10,970
unvisited primary confluences
out of 16,194 that belongto the project goal are waiting to be
reached. Currently, the rate of first visits
to primary confluences is 1-2 a day, or
500 a year. Assuming a linear trend, the
last confluence should be visited in 22
years, i.e. in the year 2030. However,
when it comes to finish the last 1%, I
predict a clear slowdown: as can be seen
an asymptotic completion for individual
countries from Figure 5 this may well be
valid for the whole world. Imagine that the
very last unvisited intersections may need
special permission due to restricted areas
or they are just extremely unattractive
for a visit. This fact could postpone a
completion beyond the year 2050.
All data was obtained from the website
confluence.org using a short Matlab script.
The html of all visits was downloaded
by the command urlread (‘ http://www.
confluence.org/confluence.php?visitid=1’),where the variable “visitid” was
looped from 1 to 15,000. The relevant
data such as latitude, longitude, date,
accuracy etc was then extracted using
regular expressions (regexp).
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| March 2008 |
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