Background
  • In 1736, the French Royal Academy of Sciences equipped an expedition.
  • It was led by mathematician Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis.
  • The objective of the expedition was to find out the exact shape of the Earth.
  • This was done by measuring the length of a degree of longitude by means of triangulation.
  • The measurement project was unique in scale and scope.
  • The measurement proved that the Earth is flattened at the poles.

history

Life in the Torne Valley in the 1730s

In Midsummer 1736, a French expedition arrived in Tornio, the northernmost town in Europe. The Torne was the main route to Lapland and the lifeblood of settlements in the area. The Torne Valley of 1736–1737 has been preserved for the later generations in the travel books of Maupertuis and Outhier.


Members of the degree-measuring expedition

The French Académie des sciences, Royal Academy of Sciences, sent an expedition to the Arctic Circle. The eight-man expedition was led by the ambitious mathematician Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis.


The expedition on the map

Réginald Outhier has written a detailed description of the expedition’s journey from Paris to Tornio and back. The journey took two months each way and was made by boat and wagon. On the way back, the expedition was in a shipwreck in the Bay of Bothnia.


HOW ARE THE TRAILS?
  • The trails leading to the measurement points are short and mostly easy to travel.
  • The trails are easy to use, for example, while driving by or when going on hikes with children.
  • The chain of measurement points can also serve as the core of a cycling route.
  • Some of the sites have signposts, some of the measurement points are still unmarked.

Downloadable materials

The drawings and old maps from Réginald Outhier’s journal, the excursion maps to the measurement points and the photographs are freely available for your use. (At the moment the page is only in Finnish.)