Australia and the 24th Parallel

Being the WORLD Geo Blog, I reckon it's high time we have a post involving Australia, mate. Growing up, my thoughts of Australia most often involved kangaroos, Paul Hogan and the Coriolis effect, although not all at once. The latter was mostly because I realized how very far from down under I existed. Beginning with the miracle of the World Book Encyclopedia and culminating with panoramio photos in Google Earth, my views of Australia have expanded and matured, like a Laphroaig 30. ;)

While this doesn't qualify as a full blown nerd project like my last post on Twitter, inspired by Catholicgauze, it's still a fun way to visualize data!

My experience to this point with the Google Earth terrain profile was limited to testing running paths, cities or perhaps small mountains or lakes. Always looking for extremes, I went ahead and drew a much longer path today, 2,400 miles, in across Australia. I chose the 24th parallel because, well, that's where my mouse pointer first clicked. My thought was to find something significant about the parallel. Unfortunately, the southern 24th parallel is the Cooper Manning of parallels- never gaining the notoriety of its bigger brothers, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and dabbling on the edge of forgotten-paralleldom.

Below is a screen shot which shows the 24th parallel drawn across the Australian continent as well as its terrain. Never reaching more than 2600 ft with an average slope of about .2% Australia is the flattest continent. A fascinating continent, though, and one which will be the subject of posts to come on World Geo Blog.


For more detail, click on the image above.

In case you were wondering, yes, that is Membata marked by the blue anchor. :)