Nowadays, Down Under may not be as, uh, down under as it once was: Over the past two decades, Australia, which sits on top of earth's fastest-moving tectonic plate, has shifted seven centimeters each year—which means the entire continent has moved about five feet to the north since 1994.

While five feet may not sound like a lot—in terms of time and space—it's enough to wreak havoc on global navigation satellite systems, which, in turn, affect things like the GPS maps on your smartphones (crucial when traveling somewhere new), delivery drones, farmers, meteorologists, and automated cars. With travel-friendly companies such as Uber planning on putting self-driving cars on the road, and cities all around the world experimenting with driverless buses, it's only a matter of time before GPS accuracy becomes a matter of public safety—if not life or death.

"If you want to start using driverless cars, accurate map information is fundamental," Dan Jaksa of Geoscience Australia told the BBC. "We have tractors in Australia starting to go around farms without a driver, and if the information about the farm doesn't line up with the coordinates coming out of the navigation system there will be problems."

In an effort to get its maps back on track, scientists are planning to roll out a revamp of Australia's coordinates by January 2017. By plotting new points at a longitude and latitude scaled 5.9 feet to the north, an overcompensation, the country's mapped coordinates should align with Earth's by 2020.

Australia sits on top of the Australian tectonic plate, which experts believe may have split from the Indo-Australian plate approximately three million years ago. Geologists say a collision of the Indo-Australian plate and the Eurasian plate formed the Himalayas between 40 and 50 million years ago. The last time Australia updated its global satellite navigation coordinates was in 1994.