Could the earth be a shape other than round?

[Viking12]

Discuss.

The teabaggers and other scientific illiterates that seem to have infested DU can hold their club meetings here while the rational among us continue having adult discussions.

[sakabatou]

1. Gravity does not work that way.

[dysfunctional press]

2. it already is.

it bulges at the equator.

[Odin2005]

27. Then many it should go on a diet.

:)

[RC]

36. The Northern hemisphere is bigger than the Southern hemisphere.

Most of the Earth's land mass in in the Northern hemisphere.

[vadawg]

3. wouldnt say round, more of a squished speroid...

on edit EPIC FAIL

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. My understanding is that it is round...

But with a couple of slightly squashed places...

:shrug:

[MineralMan]

37. Well, round-ish, really.

[smalll]

5. Is there another moon thread around that I missed?

/nt

[gkhouston]

16. Yeah, this time we tried to bring all the ice back to Johnson Space Center using a tractor beam.

Didn't work so well--it scattered all over southeast Texas.

[eShirl]

6. it is a slightly squished sphere

[CreekDog]

7. It's not quite round

kind of like sitting on a basketball.

[Arctic Dave]

8. It 's round except for the spot were it bumped it's head.

The how teabaggers were created.

[zappaman]

9. Actually, it is probably flat

If you stand on the shore and look out towards any ocean, you will notice that the farthest water you can see is flat. If the earth was round, wouldn't you see a curve downward? That's just one example. And of course, the "pictures" you see of Earth from spaced have been manipulated.
Oh, and one more thing...many believe we didn't actually go to the moon. I'm here to tell you that not only did we not go to the moon, but there really is no moon! Look it up.

[gkhouston]

10. Yeah, I heard someone got the H1N1 vaccine and turned into an oblate spheroid.

Global warming or deadly fever? You be the judge.

[DireStrike]

11. My 7th grade earth science teacher told me that it was an oblate spheroid.

He also asked how we can know it is, generally, round. I lazied my way out of it, or so I thought, by saying "pictures taken from space"... but every other argument, he showed, could be explained by the earth being this or that shape instead.

Maybe not ALL of those other arguments together, but that's more complex.

[wuushew]

12. Bizzaro Earth

[Vinca]

13. Here's a related question (and I'm a dim bulb when it comes to science).

Considering the sea of oil that has been pumped out of the earth and burned and, I assume, the corresponding loss of weight, why doesn't the earth's orbit change?

[ret5hd]

22. Uhhh...no mass has been lost. There was no loss of "weight". Just because something...

is a gas it still has weight.

[Fumesucker]

26. The combustion products weigh the same as the oil and oxygen that was consumed..

Other than a tiny amount of the total mass that was actually turned into energy.

So basically the mass of the Earth doesn't change from the oil being burned.

[dysfunctional press]

38. even if burning it did destroy it's mass, which it doesn't...

the weight of that "sea of oil" would be extremely insignificant compared to the weight of the planet.
plus- the earth still gets hit by meteroites and micro-meteorites from space that are continually adding to the planets overall mass.

[MNDemNY]

14. Yes, it is ,it is a sphere.(or close to it.)

[DJ13]

15. Sarah Palin's Earth?

[Viking12]

29. Too many sides. See post #23

[Viking12]

30. Self-delete dupe

[tabatha]

17. No, it could not be any other shape other than "roundish".

"To a first-order approximation the Earth is round. This
is due to gravity. Gravity pulls with equal strength in all
directions; therefore any variations from a spherical
shape will lead to gravitational forces that
bring the shape back into that of a sphere.

This is without considering the rotation of the earth,
however. The rotation of the earth adds centrifugal
effects, which cause the earth to bulge slightly at
its equator and flatten slightly at its poles.
(This is like twirling a rock on the end of a string
and then letting go--the rock flies away from the
twirler.) Because of these centrifugal effects, the
distance from the center of the earth to the surface
of the earth is about 0.33% shorter at the poles
compared to the equator."

Cheated by copying because it was said better than I could.

Edit - OK, next question - why do we have an atmosphere?

[HopeHoops]

18. It is shaped like a burrito.

I thought most people knew that by now.

[tabatha]

19. Hoping for adult questions?

[HopeHoops]

21. That's a line from an old Bloom County - re: flat earth.

That was a great strip.

[Viking12]

24. I think you've mistaken the earth for a 1970s rockband

[nonationbuilding]

20. Primus made it round but Unicron sat on it

[Quantess]

23. The smoking gun, folks:

[Odin2005]

25. Technically it's an oblate spheroid.

:dunce:

Edit, noticed others already beat me to that...

[Viking12]

28. Oblate Spheroids are the conclusions of a scientific hoax

The e-mails prove it. Show me the data.

[L. Coyote]

32. No, it is an oblate elipsoid.

Earth's flattening equals 0.00335281068118, or 1 : 298.257222101 per IUGG standards.

[muriel_volestrangler]

39. It's not even that, when you're being really precise

The Earth is very nearly spherical. However it has a tiny equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about one third of one percent bigger than the radius at the poles. Therefore, the simple geometric shape which most closely approximates the shape of the Earth is a biaxial ellipsoid, which is the three-dimensional figure generated by rotating an ellipse about its shorter axis (less exactly, it is the shape obtained by squashing a sphere slightly along one axis). The shorter axis of the ellipsoid approximately coincides with the rotation axis of the Earth.

Because the ellipsoid shape doesn't fit the Earth perfectly, there are lots of different ellipsoids in use, some of which are designed to best, fit the whole Earth and some to best fit just one region. For instance, the coordinate system used with the Global Positioning System (GPS) uses an ellipsoid called GRS80 (Geodetic Reference System 1980) which is designed to best-fit the whole Earth. The ellipsoid used for mapping in Britain, the Airy 1830 ellipsoid, is designed to best-fit Britain only, which it does better than GRS80, but; it is not useful in other parts of the world. So various ellipsoids used in different regions differ in size and shape, and also in orientation and position relative to each other and to the Earth. The modern trend is to use GRS80 everywhere for reasons of global compatibility. Hence, the local best-fitting ellipsoid is now rather an old fashioned idea, but it is still important because many such ellipsoids are built into national mapping coordinate systems.
...
Depending on what height we choose as 'zero height', there are any number of closed level surfaces we could choose as our global height reference surface, and the choice is essentially arbitrary. We can think of these level surfaces like layers of an onion inside and outside the Earth's topographic surface. Each one corresponds to a different potential energy level of the Earth's gravitational field, and each one, although an irregular shape, is a surface of constant height. The one we choose as our height reference surface is that level surface which is closest to the average surface of all the world's oceans. This is a sensible choice since we are coastal creatures and we like to think of sea level as having a height of zero. We call this irregular three-dimensional shape the Geoid. Although it is both imaginary and difficult to measure, it is a single unique surface: it is the only level surface which best-fits the average surface of the oceans over the whole Earth. This is by contrast with ellipsoids, of which there are many fitting different regions of the Earth.

The Geoid is very nearly an ellipsoid shape-we can define a best-fitting ellipsoid which matches the Geoid to better than two hundred metres everywhere on its surface. However, that is the best we can do with an ellipsoid, and usually we want to know our height much better than that. The Geoid has the property that every point on it has exactly the same height, throughout the world, and it is never more than a couple of metres from local mean sea level. This makes it the ideal reference surface on which to base a global coordinate system for vertical positioning. The Geoid is in many ways the true 'figure of the Earth' that we introduced in 2.1, because a fundamental level surface is intrinsic to our view of the world, living as we do in a powerful gravity field. If you like, the next step on from understanding that the shape of the Earth is 'round' rather than 'flat', is to understand that actually it is the complex Geoid shape rather than simply 'round'.

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/gps/information/coordinatesystemsinfo/guidecontents/guide2.html

[backscatter712]

31. The earth is not exactly spherical.

It's actually slightly flattened, and even has a slight pear shape. Not very perceptible from space, though. Oh, and it has those irregular bumps on its surface we call "mountains".

[bridgit]

33. Sure why not; as an oblate elliptically unstable spheroid it's trying mightly do be so

[Geoff R. Casavant]

34. It's an oblate spheroid

Like a sphere, but slightly squished at the poles. Also, the southern hemisphere is slightly larger than the northern hemisphere.

[Geoff R. Casavant]

35. The funniest and most elegant explanation I ever read:

"The earth is not a perfect sphere, but is slightly flattened at the poles. This is caused by pressure from the wingnuts, which can be clearly seen on any tabletop model of the globe."