Who said world is round

While the Earth appears to be round when viewed from the vantage point of space, it is actually closer to an ellipsoid. Our planet is pudgier at the equator than at the poles by about 70, feet.

Mountains rising almost 30, feet and ocean trenches diving over 36, feet compared to sea level further distort the shape of the Earth. Sea level itself is even irregularly shaped. The shadow moves as time passes which is the principle for ancient Shadow Clocks. If the world had been flat, then two sticks in different locations would produce the same shadow:. This is because the Earth is round, and not flat:.

Eratosthenes BCE used this principle to calculate the circumference of the Earth quite accurately. To see this demonstrated, refer to my experiment video about Eratosthenes and the circumference of the Earth. Standing on a flat plateau, you look ahead toward the horizon.

You strain your eyes, then take out your favorite binoculars and stare through them, as far as your eyes with the help of the binocular lenses can see. Next, climb up the closest tree—the higher the better, just be careful not to drop those binoculars and break their lenses. Then look again, strain your eyes, and stare through the binoculars out to the horizon. The higher up you climb, the farther you will see. Even if you stood on a completely clear plateau with no obstacles between you and the horizon, you would see much farther from the greater height than you would on the ground.

This phenomenon is caused by the curvature of the Earth as well, and would not happen if the Earth was flat:. The Earth is different from other planets, that much is true. However, there are certain characteristics all planets have, and it will be quite logical to assume that if all planets behave a certain way, or show certain characteristics—specifically if those planets are in different places or were created under different circumstances—our planet is the same.

In , Galileo Galilei observed the moons of Jupiter rotating around it. He described them as small planets orbiting a larger planet—a description and observation that was very difficult for the church to accept, as it challenged a geocentric model where everything was supposed to revolve around the Earth.

This observation also showed that the planets Jupiter, Neptune, and later Venus was observed too are all spherical, and all orbit the sun. A flat planet ours or any other planet would be such an incredible observation that it would pretty much go against everything we know about how planets form and behave. We know it. The time in New York, at the moment these words are written, is pm.

Our globe, however, is not even a perfect oblate spheroid, because mass is distributed unevenly within the planet. The greater a concentration of mass is, the stronger its gravitational pull, "creating bumps around the globe," says geologist Joe Meert at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Earth's shape also changes over time due to a menagerie of other dynamic factors.

Mass shifts around inside the planet, altering those gravitational anomalies. Mountains and valleys emerge and disappear due to plate tectonics.

Occasionally meteors crater the surface. And the gravitational pull of the moon and sun not only cause ocean and atmospheric tides but earth tides as well. In addition, the changing weight of the oceans and atmosphere can cause deformations of the crust "on the order of a centimeter or so," notes geophysicist Richard Gross at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Moreover, to even out Earth's imbalanced distribution of mass and stabilize its spin, "the entire surface of the Earth will rotate and try to redistribute mass along the equator, a process called true polar wander," Meert says.

To keep track of Earth's shape, scientists now position thousands of Global Positioning System receivers on the ground that can detect changes in their elevation of a few millimeters, Gross says. Another method, dubbed satellite laser ranging, fires visible-wavelength lasers from a few dozen ground stations at satellites.

Any changes detected in their orbits correspond to gravitational anomalies and thus mass distributions inside the planet. Still another technique, very long baseline interferometry, has radio telescopes on the ground listen to extragalactic radio waves to detect changes in the positions of the ground stations. It may not take much technology to understand that Earth is not perfectly round, but it takes quite a bit of effort and equipment to determine its true shape.

Charles Q.