One leap in geodesy has been the arrival of satellite technology. As you might expect, this has greatly expanded the amount of data available--scientists can now see things that had been previously out of view. Studies of the water cycle, glaciers and ice sheets, atmospheric temperature, and other global events have since revealed complex interactions across continents.
However, the most familiar application of geodesy is probably your everyday Global Positioning System or GPS. Geodesy is the scientific field that developed techniques for pinpointing an object's location on the surface and methods of tracking said object. In many cases, this is likely your car or phone.
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Sources:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/geodesy
http://www.jqjacobs.net/astro/geodesy.html
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/geodesy.html
http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_geodesy/
http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/PUBS_LIB/Geodesy4Layman/TR80003A.HTM#ZZ2
http://www.agu.org/sections/geodesy/
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/earth-from-space.html
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Have you ever tried GPS? Do you use it often? Have you ever run into glitches like we did once, where it sent us around a roundabout an extra few miles because it didn't understand the building we were looking for was on the other side of the roundabout?
-----The Golden Eagle
