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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".
Medieval artistic representation of a spherical Earth – with compartments representing earth, air, and water (c. 1400) The Erdapfel, the oldest surviving terrestrial globe (1492/1493) The spherical shape of the Earth was known and measured by astronomers, mathematicians, and navigators from a variety of literate ancient cultures, including ...
Earth science or geoscience includes all fields of natural science related to the planet Earth. [1] This is a branch of science dealing with the physical, chemical, and biological complex constitutions and synergistic linkages of Earth's four spheres: the biosphere , hydrosphere / cryosphere , atmosphere , and geosphere (or lithosphere ).
Many of the subsystems are characterized as "spheres", coinciding with the shape of the planet. The four spheres (for which most of the other spheres are a subtype of) are the atmosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere and the geosphere. Earth's ecosphere lies it self within the heliosphere (the Sun's astrosphere). [4]
The lithosphere, however, only refers to the uppermost layers of the solid Earth (oceanic and continental crustal rocks and uppermost mantle). [ 3 ] Since space exploration began, it has been observed that the extent of the ionosphere or plasmasphere is highly variable, and often much larger than previously appreciated, at times extending to ...
On a flat Earth, the aircraft would have travelled along three sides of a square, and arrive at a spot about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 mi) from where it started. But because Earth is spherical, in reality it will have travelled along three sides of a triangle, and arrive back very close to its starting point.
Earth is rounded into an ellipsoid with a circumference of about 40,000 km. It is the densest planet in the Solar System. Of the four rocky planets, it is the largest and most massive. Earth is about eight light-minutes away from the Sun and orbits it, taking a year (about 365.25 days) to complete one revolution.
Earth radius (denoted as R 🜨 or R E) is the distance from the center of Earth to a point on or near its surface. Approximating the figure of Earth by an Earth spheroid (an oblate ellipsoid), the radius ranges from a maximum (equatorial radius, denoted a) of nearly 6,378 km (3,963 mi) to a minimum (polar radius, denoted b) of nearly 6,357 km (3,950 mi).