Mountain-climbing enthusiast Tyler Cottenie became the subject of fervent online discussion after he announced the location of Taiwan’s “pole of inaccessibility” in Chiayi County’s Alishan Forest Recreation Park.
A pole of inaccessibility is the point considered the most inaccessible, usually the most distant location from a coastline.
Cottenie said he discovered Taiwan’s pole of inaccessibility using Google Earth and other tools.
He published his work online in English on Dec. 14 and in Chinese on Thursday last week.
Cottenie said that he narrowed down the location by drawing successively smaller areas on a map using geographical tools.
He said he was surprised to find that the pole, which is 67.411km from the nearest coastline, is only 150m from a paved road.
Cottenie posted a sign at the spot reading: “You are standing at the location farthest removed from the coast of this island.”
Cottenie posted the coordinates to the location on his Wordpress blog: N23o30’38.65” E120o49’0.9” in Alishan Township (阿里山), Chiayi County.
Chiayi Forest District Office Deputy Director Yang Jui-fen (楊瑞芬) on Monday confirmed that a sign was in place where Cottenie reported it to be, adding that the public should not go searching for it because of the danger of getting lost.
The area is easy get lost in, because there are no walkways through that part of the forest, Yang said.
A security guard who got lost in the area last year was never found, Yang said.
National Chung Cheng University Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences associate professor Cheng Kai-chien (鄭凱謙) said Cottenie’s calculations appear to be sound, but added that they fail to take elevation into account.
Cheng said that a more comprehensive three-dimensional calculation of the pole of inaccessibility would require much more information, adding that the average mountain climber would place the greatest emphasis on elevation.
The geographical center of Taiwan is at Tiger Head Mountain (虎頭山) in Nantou County’s Puli Township (埔里), where there are two monuments marking the location.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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