{"id":3616,"date":"2010-03-02T02:45:48","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T07:45:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=3616"},"modified":"2022-04-08T06:31:44","modified_gmt":"2022-04-08T11:31:44","slug":"closest-border-monuments-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/closest-border-monuments-found\/","title":{"rendered":"Closest Border Monuments — Found!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I wrote recently about the many thousands of tiny segments that form the boundary between Canada and the United States. Fittingly, I called the article Canada-USA Border Segment Extremes<\/a>. I’d been following up on a query from loyal reader “Greg”. Back then he asked if I knew where he could find the shortest of those segments. He\u2019d seen a reference to two monuments only 46 centimetres (18 inches) apart when he read the International Boundary Commission website<\/a>. Unfortunately I didn’t know the location.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an intellectual exercise, I loaded all of the boundary coordinates into a spreadsheet. Then I attempted to derive the answer mathematically. It wasn\u2019t exact but I felt I’d narrowed the location down to two distinct clusters. I said at the time that, “I\u2019m going to guess the 46 centimeter distance between two monuments falls within the eastern cluster”. It turns out I was correct but it was a lucky guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is the map I developed during that earlier attempt:<\/p>\n\n\n\n