This article about the current decades-long work to recalibrate the notion of "height" in US geological surveys and so forth is fascinating and reminds me so much of like... in a video game engine when you get too far away from the origin and start losing precision in your floating point numbers and suddenly your physics starts to glitch

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/science/maps-elevation-geodetic-survey.html