Is the Earth perfectly round?
You finally got the rare, Earth squishy and you are excited. You are squishing it so hard that if it pops, the whole classroom will get flooded. You play with it until some random person comes up to you and says ,”You know the Earth is not round,” in a weird dorky way. You hush the person away, but you wonder, is the Earth perfectly round? Lets pop this balloon to find out!
About Earth
Earth is a place where, you the reader, lives. Earth formed when dust and rock swirled around the sun, collided and clumped together over millions of years creating our molten planet. It cooled and heavy elements sank to create the Earth’s core, while lighter material rose to create the crust of the Earth. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and is the third planet from the sun which is 93 million million miles away. It is a rocky planet with four layers , including the inner core, outer core, mantle, and the crust. It’s diameter is About 7,918 miles (12,742 km) long. It spins on it’s axis once every 24 hours and travels around the sun every 365.25 days. Its atmosphere is mostly made up of nitrogen and oxygen. The Earth’s tilt is 23.5 degrees which causes the season ( not because of the distance from the sun).
Is the Earth round?
Yes, the Earth is round. The Earth is an oblate spheroid. That means its flat at the poles and bulges at the equator. This happens when the Earth rotates on the axis which causes an outwards force on the equator. This causes the equator to bulge and the poles to get compressed. In the Middle Ages people were aware that the Earth was round, but in the 1800’s, Washington Irving wrote a fictional, dramatized biography on Christopher Columbus life. The scene was where Christopher Columbus had to convince scholars (who believed the Earth was flat) that the Earth was round. This scene never happened and was repeated as real history in pop culture and more.
Fun Facts
Due to the Moon’s gravitational pull, 1.7 milliseconds is getting added to a day per century. Millions of years ago, a day on Earth was actually shorter than 24 hours. If you stood in the center of the Earth , you would weigh nothing, since gravity would be pulling you in all directions, which would cancel out your weight.
Sources
NOAA (National Ocean Service) – "Is the Earth round?"
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/earth-round.html
Scientific American – "Strange but True: Earth Is Not Round"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-is-not-round/
Discover Magazine – "The Earth Is Round, and Is Also a Shifting, Squashed Spheroid"
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-earth-is-round-and-is-also-a-shifting-squashed-spheroid-48430
