reserve on besotted , Australians – on New Year ’s Day 2017 , your entire country will jut northwards by 1.8 meters ( 5.9 animal foot ) . If , high-priced lector , you are now adorned with a doubt - impregnate scowl , then you ’ve probably clocked that this wo n’t be due to some apocalyptic teddy in plate tectonics . Continental drift , however , does have a role to play in this geographical kerfuffle .
The Australian Plate is moving about 7 cm ( 2.8 inches ) northwards every single year . This move has hoard over the decades to develop a significant variance between local coordinates on maps and orbicular coordinate in digital seafaring systems used by planet .
At present , this remainder amounts to an mistake of 1.5 time ( 4.9 foot ) . This is enough to cause a problem to anything in Australia that apply GPS - like systems , admit smartphones and vehicles .
" If you want to lead off using driverless car , accurate map information is profound , " Dan Jaksa , a phallus of Geoscience Australia , toldBBC News . “ We have tractor in Australia starting to go around farms without a driver , and if the selective information about the farm does n’t line up with the co-ordinate coming out of the navigation system there will be problems . ”
to stave off a macabre future where independent tractors plough into lost farm animals by mistake , the body politic ’s local co-ordinate will jump due north at the start of next year . By 2020 , the unrelenting border district of plate tectonics will catch up to the adjustment , and both the analog and digital coordinate sets will match up for the first time since 1994 , when the local coordinate system was last update .
So as to stop this silliness happening again , a Modern as - of - yet unspecified system will be implemented in 2020 that will keep the two sets of co-ordinate cope with in real - time . “ Once we have a system of rules that can deal with change over clip , then everybody in the humans could be on that same system of rules , ” Jaksa tot .
Australia was bind to Antarctica until around 85 million years ago , whereupon they get down to initiallyrift apart . By 45 million years ago , 21 million years after the non - avian dinosaur prick the rubble , they had completely separated from each other . Although the Australian Plate initially fused with the Indian Plate , they have since become segregated , perhaps as trivial as 3 million years ago .
In 50 million age ’ prison term , Australia will collide into the southeasterly coast of China , eventually shape a marque Modern mickle ambit . It will be one of the earliest jigsaw piece that will culminate in the organisation of Pangaea Ultima , the next reliable supercontinent , 250 million years from now . By then , it ’s potential that our co-ordinate technology would have moved on quite a morsel .
