[colineartheta]

(Current) Geodesist and Professional Land Surveyor (formerly employed as; license retained) here chiming in. While I appreciate the sentiment that we will never go out of business, I’d like to proffer a couple points related to this statement and the more technical one that followed (they’re integrally linked). While tectonic plates do move more than one might assume, it is actually those same surveyors who model this movement utilizing Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) (and other technologies) that are strategically placed and constantly collecting positional data - the National Geodetic Survey, in my opinion, is one of the most remarkable and important scientific agencies the USA maintains. Land surveying measurements rely upon the datum’s and (soon) projections NGS publishes, which indeed does account for these movements, provided the user correctly applies the velocity movement and temporal changes to the epoch desired. However, it is less this movement that keeps surveyors employed and far more their legal expertise that does. Land Surveyors are the front line maintainers, interpreters, and, in a sense, the creators/subdividers of the cadastral system responsible for private property. So long as their are (on-the-ground) boundary disputes over land and title, a surveyor will be needed. Coordinates may one day be the controlling aspect of those boundaries, but unfortunately that is not for the land surveyors to decide (I digress…a simple comment on this forum could never account for the nuances needed in that discussion).

Also, apologies, but a correction: a multi-station DOES incorporate GNSS along with a theodolite (and Electronic Distance Measurer, which, when all three are combined is marketed as a “multi station”). I believe you meant a Total Station is more precise, which is a combination theodolite/EDM, excluding GNSS, and which does, locally, produce more precise standalone measurements though at the cost of being limited to direct line of sight. Each plays an integral part of survey field work and their application.

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Thanks for your high quality response to my mediocre posting. I think our current maps are like a patchwork quilt made up of patches of high precision / high accuracy data sewn to high accuracy / low precision basemaps. Surveyors will use a ‘Horizontal/Vertical Datum of the day’ to keep things relevant to maps but in reality, their scope of work ends at xy = 5000,5000 and that’s it (relative coordinates). Most people I’ve met aren’t keeping up with NOAA. But nothing will come close to the bearings and distances (error of closure) to what a totalstation can generate in their arsenal. In the end, a Civil Engineer or GIS tech will be creating that mosaic out of the surveyor data and store it in a retrievable format for county records. The data is stored but there’s still a never reconcilable difference between survey data and mapping data.

Thus TotalStations with GNSS seem oxymoronic to me just as a GPS with a laser range finder is. There is a huge opportunity (for those interested) to build a surveyor-grade worldmap.