Talk:Public Land Survey System

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I had thought of naming this article the United States Public... , but a web search for LPSS and survey only turns up things in the U.S. Besides the title was long enouh already.

For details of the prime range line by state, just do a web search on LPSS and the state name. - Lou I 03:53 30 May 2003 (UTC)

The title of this article is misleading, as it deals exclusively with a United States land survey system, a definition not expressed in the article's title. (Alexander Ganse)

[edit] Ettymology issues

"Meet" in the context of "meets and bounds," is not what "meets the eye;" it is a modern variant on "mete" which has to do with measurement. Meets and bounds (or metes and bounds) is indeed a survey system, but it is a rigorous recording of measurements betweem natuaral markers (the bounds).

Shame on you for perpetrating fraudulent (albaeit inventive) misapprehensions.

[edit] List of Meridians and Baselines

I thought there would be an article Third Principal Meridian, but there wasn't. Since there are a finite number of meridians and baselines, it would be possible to make a list of them and have each one have an article.--Bhuck 15:34, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

I suppose there could. There's an article for the Michigan Meridian and a couple of others are in Category:Lines of longitude. older ≠ wiser 20:57, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I agree, simply because I had to search long and hard to find that list recently. So I've added it to this article, fully linked, to encourage building the articles. (In the process of adding links to the non-existant articles, wikipedia showed me an article for the San Bernardino Meridian that wasn't previously linked.) However, there are a couple of issues: I made the link for Montana's 'Principal Meridian' point to Montana Principal Meridian instead of Principal Meridian, to distinguish it from the article about the general term. And Mississippi's Washington Meridian currently points to an article about meridians in Washington, DC, which are not part of the PLSS. I'm not sure how best to resolve that conflict. As a result of this list addition, the section Meridians in the United States is probably now obsolete. Lastly, the BLM surveying manual also has a table of the early surveys in Ohio, which are described as having no initial point of origin (and thus, no baseline or meridian). Though these surveys are displayed on the BLM map in this article, it's not clear to me how relevant they are to this article, so I elected not to add that table at this time. --Diggernet 07:24, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
UPDATE: Based on the BLM manual's 1973 publication date, and the reference to Clarke's Spheroid of 1866 in section 2-82, I believe the coordinates listed are NAD27. I will continue searching for official WGS84 coordinates. If nothing else, BLM is currently working on a new edition of the manual which one would expect to have updated coordinates. --Diggernet 22:58, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
UPDATE 2: The current listed coordinates are certainly NAD27. I have obtained a copy of the draft of that section of the new edition, and it uses NAD83, not WGS84. It also emphasizes that some of the listed coordinates are only approximate. I'm not sure how to handle this, as Wikipedia expects coordinates to be in WGS84, and these coordinates don't appear to be available in that datum. --Diggernet 21:23, 25 July 2007 (UTC)