European Terrestrial Reference System 1989

The coordinates and maps in Europe based on ETRS89 are not subject to change due to the continental drift.

ETRS89 was officially born at the 1990 Florence meeting of EUREF, following its Resolution 1, which recommends that the terrestrial reference system to be adopted by EUREF will be coincident with ITRS at the epoch 1989.0 and fixed to the stable part of the Eurasian Plate.

The transformation from ETRS89 to ITRS is time-dependent and was formulated by C. Boucher, Z. Altamimi, and X. Collilieux [2][3][4] ETRS89 is the EU-recommended frame of reference for geodata for Europe.

(NAD-83 is a datum in which the North American Plate as a whole is static, and which is used for mapping and surveying in the US, Canada, and Mexico.)

WGS84 originally used the GRS80 reference ellipsoid, but has undergone some minor refinements in later editions since its initial publication.