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Strange but True: Earth Is Not Round

It may seem round when viewed from space, but our planet is actually a bumpy spheroid
By Charles Q. Choi | April 12, 2007

As countless photos from space can attest, Earth is

roundthe "Blue Marble," as astronauts have
affectionately dubbed it. Appearances, however, can be
deceiving. Planet Earth is not, in fact, perfectly round.
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This is not to say Earth is flat. Well before Columbus

sailed the ocean blue, Aristotle and other ancient
Greek scholars proposed that Earth was round. This
Kativ/iStockphoto
was based on a number of observations, such as the
fact that departing ships not only appeared smaller as they sailed away but also
seemed to sink into the horizon, as one might expect if sailing across a ball says
geographer Bill Carstensen of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Isaac Newton first proposed that Earth was not perfectly round. Instead, he suggested
it was an oblate spheroida sphere that is squashed at its poles and swollen at the
equator. He was correct and, because of this bulge, the distance from Earth's center to
sea level is roughly 21 kilometers (13 miles) greater at the equator than at the poles.
Instead of Earth being like a spinning top made of steel, explains geologist Vic Baker
at the University of Arizona in Tucson it has "a bit of plasticity that allows the shape to
deform very slightly. The effect would be similar to spinning a bit of Silly Putty,
though Earth's plasticity is much, much less than that of the silicone plastic clay so
familiar to children."
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.

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Strange but True: Earth Is Not Round - Scientific American

13/09/2015 04:11

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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

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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

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Richard Gross at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "There's also
postglacial rebound, with the crust and mantle that were depressed by the huge ice
sheets that sat on the surface during the last ice age now rebounding upward on the
order of a centimeter a year."

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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.

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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.
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Epistimonas

August 24, 2012, 12:27 AM

Because gravity is an inverse square force. Squared coordinates = sphere

nothing is perfect though, its not a perfect sphere
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