* John Smith <deltafoxtrot...@gmail.com> [2010-04-05 23:35 EDT]: > On 6 April 2010 13:19, Liz <ed...@billiau.net> wrote: > > Particularly on the River Murray, where the southern bank is defined as the > > boundary. > > I thought that's why the boundary should move, the river moving means > the border moves, doesn't it?
I can't speak to this specific river, but I've done some research on this topic recently, inspired by the question of what to do when administrative boundaries run along other ways (roads, rivers, etc.). It seems to be generally accepted that, absent any specific negotiations to the contrary, when a boundary is defined by a river, the gradual change of the river's course over time also causes the boundary to move. On the other hand, when a river's course changes abruptly (from a flood, or from a man-made diversion, for example), the border remains where it was before the change. An example of the latter is Carter Lake, Iowa in the US. A flood in 1877 moved the Missouri River, which serves as the boundary between Iowa and Nebraska, onto the opposite side of the town. The court system eventually ruled that because the change in the river's path was abrupt, the borders remained where they were before the flood, and the town remained in the state of Iowa. -- ...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/ PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2 --- -- TeX has found at least one bug in every Pascal compiler it's been run on, I think, and at least two in every C compiler. -- Donald Knuth ---- --- -- _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
