Ryan Hippenstiel

I always tell people to kind of picture their cell phone and like navigating somewhere you've never been.

My name is Ryan Hippenstiel.

First, your cell phone is using GPS technology, and then you have all these layers, right?

It might be a layer of restaurants so you can find a new pizza joint.

All of those layers need to be on top of each other in the right place for your car and your iPhone or whatever it might be to know what road it's on.

You have subsidence, you have uplift, you have the gravity field underneath the Earth changing, you have oscillating poles.

So we're all very blessed with modern technology that can navigate us around an extremely complex environment that's changing, not realizing that the work's never done, because the Earth truly is changing.

Geodesy is kind of the size and shape of the Earth, right?

It's the sciences behind the size and shape of the Earth and what changes the Earth is undergoing at all times.

I was the field operations branch chief for the National Geodetic Survey.