User:Stephanderson/The Great Circuit

The Great Circuit is the longest possible straight-line route someone could use to circumnavigate the earth. The route takes into consideration the literally millions of slight up and down shifts in elevation (elements encountered while actually traveling) to ultimately arrive at the longest path around the earth. The project began in 2004 as a conceptual query by American artist Michael Jones McKean into changing and static limitations of technical and physical possibility. After two years of independent research McKean commissioned the University of Kansas Department of Geography and Cartography to develope a computer algorithm to sift and arrange billions of geographic data points. In late spring of 2006 the route was discovered.