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The curvature of the Earth is evident in the horizon across the image, and the bases of the buildings on the far shore are below that horizon and hidden by the sea. The simplest model for the shape of the entire Earth is a sphere. The Earth's radius is the distance from Earth's center to its surface, about 6,371 km (3,959 mi). While "radius ...
A "true circumnavigation" of Earth is defined, in order to account for the shape of Earth, to be about 2.5 times as long, including a crossing of the equator, at about 40,000 km (25,000 mi). [24] On the flat Earth model, the ratios would require the Antarctic Circle to be 2.5 times the length of the circumnavigation, or 2.5 × 2.5 = 6.25 times ...
as the shape of the geoid, the mean sea level of the world ocean; or; as the shape of Earth's land surface as it rises above and falls below the sea. As the science of geodesy measured Earth more accurately, the shape of the geoid was first found not to be a perfect sphere but to approximate an oblate spheroid, a specific type of ellipsoid.
Contrary to the popular belief that the Earth was generally believed to be flat until a few hundred years ago, the spherical shape of the Earth (and other celestial bodies) has been widely accepted in the Western world (and universally by scholars) since at least the Hellenistic period (323 BCE–31 BCE), with the first known measurement of Earth's circumference conducted by Eratosthenes.
A wealth of new information about Earth’s inner core has surfaced in recent months. Scientists now have evidence that the planet’s innermost layer is changing shape.
Earth orbits the Sun, making Earth the third-closest planet to the Sun and part of the inner Solar System. Earth's average orbital distance is about 150 million km (93 million mi), which is the basis for the astronomical unit (AU) and is equal to roughly 8.3 light minutes or 380 times Earth's distance to the Moon.
Getty Images Pangaea, the supercontinent that existed about 200 million years ago and combined most of dry land on Earth into one giant landmass ( according to the BBC ), is well known.
Although the surface of Earth is best modelled by an oblate ellipsoid of revolution, for small scale maps the ellipsoid is approximated by a sphere of radius a, where a is approximately 6,371 km. This spherical approximation of Earth can be modelled by a smaller sphere of radius R, called the globe in this section. The globe determines the ...