• Question: What ways can you disprove the idea that the Earth is flat?

    Asked by AnimalNerd to yoyehudi, Oli, Nina, Kerrianne, Ed on 8 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 8 Nov 2017:


      Jeremy Clarkson once flew all the way around the world, stopping off on the way, and there’s no way he could have kept it a secret if he’d had to cheat 😉 Ships can also sail around Antarctica and soon (thanks to global warming) they’ll be able to do the same around the Arctic too. Satellites take continuous pictures of Earth and show it’s a sphere (it always looks like a circle and shows different continents every time), you can see it’s round in photos from the international space station and moon (and no astronaut’s ever gone ‘wait a second, it’s flat!’), and, if you get up high enough you can see the curve. (You’d need to go a bit higher than most jet liners and be lucky with the clouds, but it’s possible.) Alternatively, you can look at a ship on the horizon from two different heights, like in the photos in the first answer here: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/7283/how-high-must-one-be-for-the-curvature-of-the-earth-to-be-visible-to-the-eye
      Those are some ideas that come to my mind – can you think of any others?

    • Photo: Kerrianne Harrington

      Kerrianne Harrington answered on 9 Nov 2017:


      I would look at the horizon from a high place and see how your view changes.

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