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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".
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 described as an ellipsoid, which was realized in the early modern ...
Adherence to the geocentric model stemmed largely from several important observations. First of all, if the Earth did move, then one ought to be able to observe the shifting of the fixed stars due to stellar parallax. Thus if the Earth was moving, the shapes of the constellations should change considerably over the course of a year. As they did ...
After recounting the legend [12] he remarks that "the preceding monks hoped to go to heaven without leaving the earth, to find 'the place where the sky and the earth touch,' and open the mysterious gateway which separates this world from the other. Such is the cosmographical notion of the universe; it is always the terrestrial valley crowned by ...
The tectonic plates of the lithosphere on Earth Earth cutaway from center to surface, the lithosphere comprising the crust and lithospheric mantle (detail not to scale). A lithosphere (from Ancient Greek λίθος (líthos) ' rocky ' and σφαίρα (sphaíra) ' sphere ') is the rigid, [1] outermost rocky shell of a terrestrial planet or natural satellite.
The equator of the idealized earth is a great circle and any meridian and its opposite meridian form a great circle. Another great circle is the one that divides the land and water hemispheres. A great circle divides the earth into two hemispheres and if a great circle passes through a point it must pass through its antipodal point.
s is along the surface of Earth, d is the straight line distance, and ~d is the approximate straight line distance assuming h << the radius of Earth, 6371 km. In the SVG image, hover over a graph to highlight it. On a completely flat Earth without obstructions (mountains, hills, valleys or volcanos), the ground itself would never obscure ...
Equirectangular projection of the world; the standard parallel is the equator (plate carrée projection). Equirectangular projection with Tissot's indicatrix of deformation and with the standard parallels lying on the equator True-colour satellite image of Earth in equirectangular projection Height map of planet Earth at 2km per pixel, including oceanic bathymetry information, normalized as 8 ...