Earth is Not Flat, but it's not Perfectly Round Either

Introduction:

We used to see countless pictures of the Earth, and come to know that the Earth is round, a round shaped ball called “Blue Marble”. But the reality is more shocking than usual. All our expectations come to an end when we learned that the Earth is not perfectly round. But that doesn’t means that the Earth is flat. This is completely a false prediction. From early ages, before the arrival of Columbus and sailed the blue ocean, many Greek philosophers like Aristotle and other predicted that the Earth is rounds. And even after many times this theory is considered a true one. Actually, they predict about shaped based on their observations. One of their major observations was that the departing ship, when it goes far away in the Ocean, it appears like a sinking one and become smaller. Like the ship moves around the edge of a circle and disappears in a sudden time.

Observations of Isaac Newton:

Isaac Newton was the first scientist, who challenged these observations and suggested that the Earth is not perfectly round. He claims that the Earth looks like a oblate spheroid, a spherical body squashed from its ends called poles and blotted from its center called “Equator”. And guess what, his predictions about the shape of the Earth seem true. That was a shocking truth and looks awful to the whole scientific community. Scientist starts working on this observation and measures the distance of the Earth from its center to sea level. That was estimated roughly about 21 kilometers. This distance is greater at the equator than the poles of the Earth.

Other kinds of Possible Observations:

A scientist name “Vic Baker” from “University of Arizona” did a thorough research on this topic. He suggested that unlike a spherical ball made up of steel, Earth contains a minute amount of plastic in addition to hard material. This plastic helps the Earth to deform its shape very slightly. Although it is a silly example but no one could explain better than this.

So, our Earth is not even a perfect spheroid. We say that the mass on the Earth is distributed unevenly. Here comes the idea of gravitational pull. Heavier the mass of the object, greater the force of attraction toward the center of Earth. Heavy objects placed at different places of the Earth create large bumps due to their greater gravitational pull towards the center. This was observed by a scientist named “Joe Meert” from University of Florida located in Gainesville.

Shape of Earth and distribution of Mass:

The shape of the Earth also changes time to time due to the effect of some dynamic forces. Sometimes Earth shifts its mass around the places or due to tectonic motions the shape change drastically. Like some mountain ranges and valleys that were located and part of the Earth in the past, suddenly disappear. This happens due to the motion of plate tectonics. Earth moves its surface over another and some geological features may appear or disappears from the Earth. There were a large number of Islands discovered and this is the result of plate tectonics. Similarly, gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon create Earth tides.

Conclusion:

In addition to all, the continuously changing weight of Oceans affects the crust and deform its shape up to centimeters. This was noted by a geophysicist Richard Gross. I think it took a way more technology to understand the shape of Earth and comes to a satisfying conclusion. Any change that is observed should be inspect more carefully and repeatedly until we all agrees on one statement.