Tripoint

A tripoint, trijunction,triple point or tri-border area is a geographical point at which the borders of three countries or subnational entities meet.

There are approximately 176 international tripoints. Nearly half are situated in rivers, lakes or seas. When on dry land, the exact tripoints are usually indicated by markers or pillars, and occasionally by larger monuments.

Usually, the more neighbours a country has, the more international tripoints that country has. China with 16 tripoints and Russia with 11 to 14 lead the list of states by number of tripoints. Within Europe, landlocked Austria has nine tripoints, among them two with Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Island countries such as Japan have no tricountry points (some, like Bahrain and Singapore, have tripoints in the territorial waters), nor have states with only one neighbour state, like Portugal or Denmark. Likewise the United States with two neighbour states has no tricountry points; it has a number of tristate points as well as one point where four states meet. Canada, as well, has a four-point area, where Nunavut, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories meet.

Tripoint (novel)

Tripoint is a science fiction novel written by the United States science fiction and fantasy author C. J. Cherryh, and was first published by Warner Books in September 1994. It is one of Cherryh's Merchanter novels and is set in the author's Alliance-Union universe.

Background

In the Alliance-Union universe, Tripoint is a system of three "dark" masses orbiting each other. They are not composed of dark matter; rather, they are much less luminous than a star. Two of the points are brown dwarfs, and the third may have been captured later. It was first charted and navigated in 2266, and serves as a staging jump-point on some of the commercial station-to-station hops, for example, Pell–Viking and Pell–Mariner. Tripoint's orbital behavior is troublesome to predict due to gravitational interactions of three massive bodies; thus, navigation is challenging in the vicinity.

Plot summary

Twenty years in the past, merchanter ships Sprite and Corinthian were docked at Mariner Station. What started out as a friendly sleepover between the inexperienced Marie Hawkins of Sprite and Austin Bowe of Corinthian turned into rape, with Marie becoming pregnant. She elected to raise the child, Thomas Bowe-Hawkins, on Sprite, but was consumed with rage. Tom grew up with an ambivalent mother and was never fully accepted by his family. When Austin later became senior captain of Corinthian, Marie started tracking Corinthian's movements in order to expose what she suspected was smuggling.

Tripoint (disambiguation)

A tripoint is a geographical point at which the borders of three countries or regions meet.

Tripoint may also refer to:

See also