| has gloss | eng: In U.S. land surveying under the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), a section is an area nominally one square mile, containing , with 36 sections making up one survey township on a rectangular grid. Due to such things as survey errors, poor instrumentation, difficult terrain, and sloppy work by surveyors it is common for actual sections to differ from the PLSS ideal one square mile. The distortions and errors were, by design, distributed to the northern and western edges of each township. As a result the sections in these areas diverge the most from the ideal shape and size. In addition there was a need to regularly adjust the entire township grid to account for distortions caused by the curvature of the Earth and the convergence of meridians toward the poles. In places where the grid was corrected, or where two grids based on different principal meridians came together, section shapes are often highly warped. Despite the survey errors and flaws, once the grid was established it remained in force mainly because historical boundaries hold legal precedent over new surveys evidence. |
