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Aftenposten Article - English translation by Terje Mathisen

The new extreme sport for nerds

Hunting for confluences with map, GPS and camera

by Hans Marius Tonstad

GPS-enthusiasts all over the world are combing the globe for confluences, points where longitude and latitude lines meet.

The target of the hunt is to use GPS-technology to locate each crossing point between integer longitude and latitude line, take photos of the point and then post them on a web site called confluence.org.

Nerdy

- You feel like a small explorer when you are out there searching for a point. You don't know exactly where it is, and you get some of that "nobody has ever been here before" excitement says Eirik Refsdal to Aftenposten online.

The NTNU-student have collected two of the points that have been registered in Norway.

- When we hunted for a point in Sør-Trøndelag, we discovered that it was located in the sea. Fortunately we met a local guy who would lend us a boat. I must admit that we felt a bit nerdy when we had to explain why we needed his boat to take photos of a special point 25 meter into the sea.

Tourists are "stealing"

There are more than 16,146 land-based confluences on the planet. Less than 3000 of these have been documented so far. Norway is one of the countries where people have spent the most time hunting these points.

For people interested in collecting such a trophy, there's not that many left in Norway. Refsdal tells us that there are foreigners travelling to Norway to gather points. In his district, Trøndelag, a german guy have been a diligent collector of first visits that he has documented on confluence.org.