September October 2017

9 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon  |  www.plso.org Geodesy S everal years ago I read the book, Measure of the Earth, by Larrie D. Ferreiro, which traced the 1735–1744 French expedition to the equator to determine the length of a degree of latitude. The expe- dition was commissioned because there was a dispute in the scientific communities as to the shape of the earth. Was it elon- gated at the poles, prolate, as Descartes believed or was it flattened at the poles, oblate, as Newton believed? Well if you don’t already know the answer, you will have to read the book. After finishing the book, I got the idea that it would be fun to go to Quito, Ecuador, and see some of the country that greet- ed the expedition. I shared the idea with several people, but it didn’t gain traction until one day Gavin Schrock, Washington State Reference Network administrator, posted on www.rplstoday.com, that he too had just finished reading the book. I replied with my idea of making our own expedition and we were off to the races! Rich Leu, organizer of the annu- al Surveyors Rendezvous, posted that if we got an expedition together he would like to be a part of it. In a short time, we had about 15 people including Dave Doyle and Michael Dennis wishing to be included. In the end, due to scheduling conflicts we downsized to a party of five which included myself, Mark Armstrong, retired Oregon NGS advisor, Ken Bays, retired Oregon Real-time GNSS Network administrator, John Hamilton, owner of Terrasurv from Pennsylvania, and There was a dispute in the sci- entific communities as to the shape of the earth. Was it elon- gated at the poles, prolate, as Descartes believed or was it flattened at the poles, oblate, as Newton believed?