I was wondering how poeople navigate when near, say, the south pole, when lines of latitude aren’t “straight”.
I mean, say you’re walking towards the South Pole station - you’re heading south (obviously). But if you keep walking in a straight line past the station, suddenly you’re going north. Or if you were walking in a straight line, but passing a mile to one side of the pole, you’d be going almost due south, then (say) southeast, then east as you passed parallel with the pole, then northeast, then almost due north, all without deviating from your “straight” line.
It seems to me like this could be a real headache - the lat-long grid that we’re used to seeng as more or less a rectangular grid would look more like a dartboard if your map included the pole. So what system do they use?
I would suspect that most of the directions would still work somewhat for the south pole station… south becomes ‘inward’, north becomes ‘outward’, east is ‘clockwise around’ and west is ‘anticlockwise around.’
However, the one need that I can see would be for a word to clearly express the idea of ‘outward in the direction of _______’, when starting from the station, because all directions are outward. Maybe you could set up four new cardinal points along the greenwich line, 90 E, 90W, and the start of the date line, and use them to indicate outward directions.
When I was on a submarine near (and at) the North Pole in the early '90s, our fire control system could not deal with us being so close to the pole, because the lines of latitude all meet there. Also, when our track took us through the pole, the direction of north changed too radically for the program to keep up with. The result was that the program kept crashing.
We finally overrode the system, and reset it such that the fire control system’s North Pole was reset to the intersection of the Prime Meridian and the Equator. (We informally called this the “West Pole.” )
Everything worked fine then.
The only problem then was the our sub’s track on the screen showed us driving around the interior of Africa.
I don’t recall if the sub’s gyroscopic compasses and/or inertial navigation system were similarly reset when operating near the pole. I don’t think that the GPS system was affected, but I do recall that we had occasional difficulty getting a signal from a sufficient number of satellites for a fix.
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