Conventional International Origin is a conventionally defined reference axis of the pole's average location over the year 1900.
Polar motion is the movement of Earth's rotation axis across its surface. The axis of the Earth's rotation tends, as the axis of a gyroscope, to maintain its orientation to inertial space. The Conventional International Origin is used to measure this movement.
Famous quotes containing the words conventional and/or origin:
“One of the reasons, surely, why women have been credited with less perfect veracity than men is that the burden of conventional falsehood falls chiefly on them.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“In the woods in a winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing branches of the forest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)