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With a spherical Earth, half the planet is in daylight at any given time and the other half experiences nighttime. When a given location on the spherical Earth is in sunlight, its antipode – the location exactly on the opposite side of Earth – is in darkness. The spherical shape of Earth causes the Sun to rise and set at different times in ...
Image from space: The spherical surface of planet Earth. Spherical Earth or Earth's curvature refers to the approximation of the figure of the Earth to a sphere. The concept of a spherical Earth gradually displaced earlier beliefs in a flat Earth during classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. The figure of the Earth is more accurately ...
The claims of modern flat Earth proponents are not based on scientific knowledge and are contrary to over two millennia of scientific consensus based on multiple confirming lines of evidence that Earth is roughly spherical. [3] Flat Earth beliefs are classified by experts in philosophy and physics as a form of science denial. [4] Flat Earth ...
Aristotle (384–322 BC) provided observational arguments supporting the idea of a spherical Earth, namely that different stars are visible in different locations, travelers going south see southern constellations rise higher above the horizon, and the shadow of Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse is round, and spheres cast circular ...
Between 640 and 720 million years ago, the Earth was covered in ice, snagging it the modern nickname “Snowball Earth.” Recently, researchers found a rock formation that shows the transition ...
However, it contains clear proofs of Earth's sphericity in the first chapter. [89] [90] Many scholastic commentators on Aristotle's On the Heavens and Sacrobosco's Treatise on the Sphere unanimously agreed that Earth is spherical or round. [91] Grant observes that no author who had studied at a medieval university thought that Earth was flat. [92]
The Earth's radius is the distance from Earth's center to its surface, about 6,371 km (3,959 mi). While "radius" normally is a characteristic of perfect spheres, the Earth deviates from spherical by only a third of a percent, sufficiently close to treat it as a sphere in many contexts and justifying the term "the radius of the Earth".
Throughout the Middle Ages, most scholars and educated figures understood that the Earth was spherical. The notion that medieval Europeans believed in a flat Earth is a misconception largely ...