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The Christmas tree, which can be traced in its origins back to pre-Christian European beliefs, represents an axis mundi. [32] In Yoruba religion, oil palm is the axis mundi (though not necessarily a "world tree") that Ọrunmila climbs to alternate between heaven and earth. [33] Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1492)
Earth's rotation imaged by Deep Space Climate Observatory, showing tilt. Earth's rotation or Earth's spin is the rotation of planet Earth around its own axis, as well as changes in the orientation of the rotation axis in space. Earth rotates eastward, in prograde motion. As viewed from the northern polar star Polaris, Earth turns counterclockwise.
Conventional International Origin (CIO) is a conventionally defined reference axis of the pole's average location on the Earth's surface over the year 1900–1905. [1] Polar motion is the movement of Earth's rotation axis across its surface. The axis of the Earth's rotation tends, as the axis of a gyroscope, to maintain its orientation to ...
Many mythological cosmologies included an axis mundi, the central axis of a flat Earth that connects the Earth, heavens, and other realms together. In the 4th century BC Greece, philosophers developed the geocentric model , based on astronomical observation; this model proposed that the center of the Universe lies at the center of a spherical ...
To take into account such movement, celestial pole definitions come with an epoch to specify the date of the rotation axis; J2000.0 is the current standard. An analogous concept applies to other planets: a planet's celestial poles are the points in the sky where the projection of the planet's axis of rotation intersects the celestial sphere.
Scientists say the Earth's axis tilt has changed due to melting ice caps over the last few decades.
Earth's surface is the boundary between the atmosphere, and the solid Earth and oceans. Defined in this way, it has an area of about 510 million km 2 (197 million sq mi). [12] Earth can be divided into two hemispheres: by latitude into the polar Northern and Southern hemispheres; or by longitude into the continental Eastern and Western hemispheres.
The deposits by thermal currents are determined by the axis of Earth, which determines solar coverage of Earth's surface. Changes in Earth's axis can also be observed in the geographical layout of volcanic island chains, which are created by shifting hot spots under Earth's crust as the axis and crust move. [5]