Like the title says. I’m trying to explain triangulation to my actual five year old, but don’t really understand it myself. Help!
In: Earth Science
Triangulation is the process of using angles and distances to find a point on a map.
This is most commonly used in navigation where you don’t have any obvious features to follow like a road or river.
Imagine you are standing out on a moor, and you can see a mountain in the distance. If you have a compass you can use that to work out the bearing (direction) from where you are standing to that feature.
If you then take a map, and draw a line from the feature you are looking at, backwards along that bearing, you know that you are standing somewhere along that line.
If you then pick another feature in the distance and repeat the process – take a bearing, then draw that line on your map – the point you are standing at is where those two lines intersect.
You can also use this maths the other way round to do things like find the position and distance of a distant point if you have two known points to measure from – this is how the British Ordnance Survey mapped the entire country – they set out two fixed points (marked with concrete pillars known as triangulation points) that they knew the distance between, and by measuring the angle from each point to a distant third point (such as the top of a mountain) they could place that third point on a map that they were drawing.
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