The geographical centre of Earth is the geometric centre of all land surfaces on Earth. Geometrically defined it is the centroid of all land surfaces within the two dimensions of the Geoid surface which approximates the Earth’s outer shape.

Explained in a different way, it is the location on the surface of Earth where the sum of distances to all locations on land is the smallest.

Its distance definition follows the shortest path on the surface of Earth along the great circle (orthodrome).

In 1864, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, gave in his book Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid the coordinates with 30°00′N 31°00′E / 30.000°N 31.000°E / 30.000. 31.000 (Geographical centre of all land surfaces on Earth (Smyth 1864)), the location of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

In October of that year, Smyth proposed to position the prime meridian at the longitude of the Great Pyramid because there it would “pass over more land than [at] any other [location]”. He also argued the cultural significance of the location and its vicinity to Jerusalem.

In 1973, Andrew J. Woods, a physicist with Gulf Energy and Environmental Systems in San Diego, California, used a digital global map and calculated the coordinates on a mainframe system as 39°00′N 34°00′E / 39.000°N 34.000°E / 39.000.

1,800 km north of Giza. In 2003, a new calculation based on a global digital elevation model obtained from satellite measurements, ETOPO2, whose data points are spaced 2′ (3.7 km at the equator) led to the result ♁ 41° N, 35° E and thus validating Wood’s calculation.

Various definitions of geographical centres exists. The definition used by the references in this article refer to calculations within the 2 dimensions of a surface, mainly as the surface of Earth is the domain of human cultural existence.

Those centres can be found inside Earth mostly near its core. A projection of those centres towards the surface would be then an alternative definition of the geographical centre, some of those calculations result in a surface location projection not that far away from the geographical centre.

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It would be a strange coincidence (but of course possible) if the landmass would be exactly evenly divided between the northern and southern hemispheres, as defined by the equator. However, you can cut the globe with another plane and form two hemispheres that have the same landmass, eg.

Calculation of Geographical centre of Earth by whuber at GIS stackexchange. The landmass distribution is largely depending of the location of the continental plates, but Global Paleogeography maps also suggest that the breakup of Pangaea follows other laws than an even distribution between north and south hemisphere.

The problems to find a map that accurately portrays which hemisphere actually has a greater landmass, is probably related to the fact that many popular (and in many ways useful. ) map projections are not made to show area relations.

This might also be an interesting article for you and a starting point for further research: Riguzzi et al. (2009) Can Earth’s rotation and tidal despinning drive plate tectonics.

The authors argue that there is a correlation between tectonic movements and rotation of the Earth and the Moon’s revolution plane. Tomographic data of slab dip angles support the point and this might also be part of an explanation why earthquakes and volcanism varies along the latitudes and might be rare in the polar regions.

In the attached JPL graphic from Heflin et al, 2007.9- every data point located south of the equator shows a northward component of motion (except the Nazca plate west of South America and a small portion of the Eurasian plate in Indonesia). Australia, for example, is moving dramatically northeastward, compared to other regions.

If landmass evacuation from the southern hemisphere has progressed similarly for tens of millions of years, it should not be a surprise our world map looks as it does.

After emerging from a north-south line in the Atlantic pushing South America and Africa apart, landmass ostensibly meets on the opposite side of the earth in the Mariana subduction zone. This complex motion, combined with my northward angular momentum theory, creates the disjointed continental drift we observe.

Present distribution of land masses have occurred due to the movement of tectonic plates. The real reason of the movement of plates is not precisely known, but it is perhaps related with the events that are occurring inside the Earth’s interior, there is molten lava where several circles of waves are in continuous movement.

There are two types of areas, one where waves converge, while another where up-moving waves diverge in opposite direction below the crust. In the areas where waves converge, the land mass is concentrated over there.

Land masses have converged around North pole, probably because of these converging waves. This phenomena is geophysically very complex and needs extensive and deep research.

Antartica, continent that is just in the south of the Earth, is completely surrounded by rifts, where new land in constantly in creation and pushing north and south. As result adjacent plates are forced north while Antartica rises.

Probably in the future we’ll see more land than now in the north hemisphere. There are 3 independent forces at play on moveable objects like continents on the surface of a rotating sphere.

Hemisphere towards the N.Pole and those in the S. Hemisphere towards the S.

There is no angular momentum that pushes all crustal mass towards just one pole. Subduction/Emission ie.

Rebalancing forces after heavy meteor bombardments in Either Hemisphere will rebalance by shifting crustal plates away from the Hemisphere that has been hit. In two dimensions if you put a ‘balancing lead slug’ on a slider ring on an unbalanced car wheel then the slug will move to the balance position when the wheel is in motion.

The first two of these forces must eventually lead to both hemispheres having equal total crustal plate masses. Given average sial density of 2.2 that means roughly equal crustal areas should be present by now.

S.Africa stands out as the hit zone due to the shape of the E.Rift Valley and extensive heavy metal placements in that area. The rough equispacing of Africa, Australia and S.America also tend to support this given the ratio of their areas.

Floating continents on a rotating sphere follow the “right-hand rule”. A dynamic force vector acts toward the north on a globe spinning counter clockwise, when looking down upon the north pole.

A casual glance at the tapered appearance of South America, Africa, Greenland and the Indian subcontinent add anecdotal evidence to the theory. South America looks like a bubble moving northward with greatest mass at the north and a thinning tail on the south end.

I’ve never heard this theory advanced by anyone, but it seems plausible to me. Alfred Wegener offered his tectonic plate theory in 1912.

The autumn equinox is upon us. On Saturday (Sept.

or, “across the disc,” if you’re a flat-Earther.For flat-Earthers — the vocal online community of folks who believe the world is actually flat and science is a conspiracy — the equinox can be tricky to explain. Without axial tilt, the phenomenon in which the rotating, spherical Earth angles its poles toward or away from the sun, how can the changing seasons be reliably explained.

If the North Pole sits at the exact center of the world, can compass directions even exist. [7 Ways to Prove the Earth Is Round].

Be warned: Understanding them requires discarding a few thousand years of what you might consider accepted scientific knowledge. For starters, forget the heliocentric model of the solar system.

In the most popular flat-Earth maps, the North Pole sits roughly at the center of the planetary disc, while Antarctica forms a giant ice wall along the planet’s circumference. The equator forms a ring hallway between the two.

however, to account for the equal hours of daytime and nighttime, the models make a few tweaks to how the sun itself looks and behaves. While you might envision the sun as an enormous ball of exploding gas located 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away, a flat-Earther would see it as a teeny, tiny spotlight hovering just over the Earth.

According to the early flat-Earth thinker Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who published the influential treatise “Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe” in 1881, the sun is only about 32 miles (52 km) in diameter and hovers anywhere from 400 to 700 miles (640 to 1,130 km) above the Earth, depending on the month.

Here’s how members of the Flat Earth Society (one of the foremost flat-Earth activist groups in the world) describe the idea on their official wiki page: “The sun moves in circles around the North Pole.

When it’s not, it’s night. The light of the sun is confinedto a limited area, and its light acts like a spotlight upon the Earth.”.

According to one popular theory, the sun circles closest to the North Pole in June, then spends the next six months spiraling slowly outward toward the ice wall at the edge of the world. In December, the sun reverses course and spirals back inward again.During the spring and autumn equinoxes, the sun circles in a perfect loop around the equator, casting light on half of the disc world at any given time.

This explanation has its problems. For starters, a sun circling 3,000 miles (5,000 km) above a flat Earth would never actually “set,” even at the most southern latitudes.

As shown in his video, the sun (actually a drone carrying a ping-pong ball) never dips below the horizon, even at its farthest point from the observer. Moreover, during an equinox, the sun appears to rise due east and set due west everywhere on Earth except at the poles.

That’s the only way it could appear as if it was always coming from the east. YouTube user Flat Out, another prolific globe-Earth proponent, demonstrated the impossibility of this explanation using simple computer simulations in 2017.

But that doesn’t stop the community from trying — or, in some cases, not trying. Like many conspiracy theories, it’s the uncertainty that makes flat-Earth theory a mystery worth obsessing over for its proponents.

Originally published on Live Science.

The ELLIPSOID DEM depicts the earth as an ellipsoid. Although distances from the surface of an ellipsoid to the earth’s center along each latitude are identical, each latitude has its own unique value increasing from each pole toward the equator.

Each grid cell value represents the distance in meters from the surface to the earth’s center of mass. A complex combination of trigonometric functions was applied to create the representation of the ellipsoid.

The difference between the major and minor axes of the WGS84 ellipsoid is 42,770 meters. The difference between the length of the radius at the equator and one of the poles is 21,385 meters—only 0.33 percent of the radius.

What would happen if the earth stopped spinning and the centrifugal effect ceased to force oceans to accumulate around the equator. It appears that the world’s ocean would split into two polar oceans and leave the equatorial area totally dry.

For this “what if” simulation, the elevation of the sea level was based on the assumption that the volume of ocean water would be about the same as it is today. Returning to a geoid representation of the earth, one more simulation models an earth where all the glaciers have melted.

If all the water in these glaciers were released, the MSL would rise about 80 meters above its current level.

The author would like to thank his colleagues—Melita Kennedy, Lenny Kneller, Corey LaMar, and Marcelo Villacres—for their significant contributions to this article.

The location on the opposite side of the earth from your point is called your antipode or antipodal location. If you want to produce an antipodes map on your own there is a simple relation to consider: Your antipodal location by lat-long will be identical to your location, except with the direction reversed.

The antipodal longitude will be 180° difference between the two points, with reversed direction, resulting in a location at 74° W having an antipode at 106° E. x° N/S y° E/W ↦ x° S/N (180 − y)° W/E.

But there are also many examples of antipodes map on the internet to be found. Just google for images with the term “antipodes map”.

Example from visualizing.org:. It is quite amazing how little chance there is to reach another land mass when drilling through the earth to your antipode.

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A Journey to the Centre of the Earth is a wonderful action adventure where you -as Prof. Lidenbrock in the story of the same name by Jules Verne- travel to the middle point of the earth.

The cave system is BIG and there is a lot to discover, many riddles to solve, a lot to worry about and to hope – you fear that the game doesn’t crash and you hope that it works fine until the end 😀 , because the mistakes in the quick graphic get worse during the proceeding game.

One might especially like the humor, which -maybe also unintentionally- found its way into the game during the design. The graphics are relatively simple but quick, added with a nice pushing sound which aids the play instinct.

The controls are very important, especially the fire button:.

Worf: “The game receives the title “educational specially valuable”, because you can make it without the use of the weapons.”. Robotron2084: “The games receives the title “gaming value technically specially questionable”, because it comes along like a wondrous mixture of a scrolling Jet Set Willy and another, not more closely definable, but definitely not very good title.

“A Journey to the center of Strangeness” would have been a rather tested title. 5 points out of 10 points for this comic something, but only because I am feeling generous toady.”.

Despite all the inconsistencies as e.g. the “end rating” there is a kind of “I-want-to-play-it-again-factor” due to the many puzzles.

There is one problem: most of the time the program counts only 10 treasures, although you brought all the 11 treasures to the surface. But you can also set the counter up manually in address $B7E9 to be able to view the great.

Everyone thought the earth was flat until Christopher Columbus set people straight. “We know better now.” You’ve probably heard this before, perhaps even from a teacher.

More shockingly, the view that everyone once believed in a flat earth is itself a myth, invented in the 1880s to discredit the Middle Ages, Christianity, and the Bible. That’s why it’s especially distressing to see a new movement gaining traction in Christian circles, asserting that the image of earth as a globe is a modern falsehood and we need to get back to what the Bible teaches.

Not only will we better appreciate the wonder of God’s round earth and realize that even ancient humans could correctly understand many of its traits without the benefits of “modern science,” we can also better understand Bible references that might puzzle us at first.

Just one example of someone who thought that the earth is a globe was the Greek mathematician Pythagoras (sixth century BC), though we don’t have a record of his reasons. Another example is Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BC and gave several sound reasons, based on observation, why the earth must be a sphere.

Between them, another famous Greek, Eratosthenes, accurately measured the earth’s circumference around 200 BC. All these sources were known and often referenced in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages, at least in the West and in the Middle East.

Along the way, he took a jab at the church and the supposed errors in the Bible. Others took up his story with gusto to bolster their own attacks on Christianity’s supposed war against science, such as John Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874).

The primary instigator in the flat-earth movement was Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1884). What convinced Rowbotham that the earth was flat.

He could see the boat the entire six miles, though he calculated that if the earth were a globe, the boat ought to have completely disappeared over the earth’s curvature. Rowbotham then combined this argument with his own hyper-literal interpretations of certain biblical passages.

His work sparked so much interest that by the time of his death in 1884, he had quite a following with flat-earth organizations around the globe. Other authors wrote their own books in defense of a flat earth, and the movement reached a peak in the late 1800s before it waned.

All this has changed in the last decade. Around 2012, videos promoting the notion that the earth is flat began appearing on the internet.

Apparently, Dubay encountered the century-old writings of Rowbotham and others, reintroducing their ideas to a new generation. While Dubay is not a Christian, some Christians, apparently impressed with the supposed biblical arguments for the flat earth, took up the mantle.

What is the flat-earth model. In the flat-earth model, the earth is a flat disk, with the North Pole at its center.

The ice wall keeps the oceans’ water contained on earth. Somewhere beyond the ice wall, a dome rests over the earth.

The dome turns each day, producing the motion of stars that we see each night. The sun and moon orbit under the dome, circling the axis of the North Pole.

The sun and moon don’t actually rise and set. they merely appear to do so.

This all may sound like some sort of joke, but the proponents of a flat earth are very serious. And this belief is making inroads into the church.

The flat-earth movement threatens to marginalize the church and ultimately undermine the reliability of Scripture. How do we know that the earth is really a globe.

If the earth is a disk with an impenetrable dome over top, obviously no satellites or space stations can be orbiting the earth. Nor could astronauts have landed on the moon.

Many people in the flat-earth movement have adopted a map of the earth like this one (technically known as an azimuthal equidistant projection). The North Pole is positioned at the center, and the map lacks a south pole.

After all, belief that the earth is spherical goes back much earlier than satellites and NASA. One of the best arguments, used by both Aristotle and Ptolemy, is something people can see for themselves.

It is always circular. A flat object would cast a circular shadow only with a certain orientation, such as occurs when the sun is directly behind the earth at midnight.

A disk would cast many different strange shapes, especially obvious at sunrise or sunset. Only a sphere will cast a circular shadow regardless of orientation.

They deny that lunar eclipses are caused by the earth’s shadow. Then what causes lunar eclipses.

Does the Bible teach anything about a flat earth. Flat-earthers think so.

In fact, they often say the Bible’s authority is at stake and we need to reject man’s lies. Would you be able to answer them.

The number of verses they cite is extensive, more than 200 by some counts. There’s just one problem.

If the flat-earth meaning is so obvious, why did nearly every Christian in the past miss that meaning. Let’s examine a few of these passages.

So it’s obviously not a sphere because a sphere doesn’t have corners, right.

That’s how believers have always understood the words, and it is the correct understanding. If the flat-earth interpretation were correct, it wouldn’t help them anyway.

How can a round earth have four corners.

Surely, flat-earthers reason, a globe earth has no ends, but a flat earth does. Here again, words have more than literal, spatial meanings.

Isaiah 45:22). Clearly, these uses do not refer to a physical edge of the earth.

Another verse that flat-earthers use is Daniel 4:11. The prophet describes a tree that grew so tall that it could be seen from all over the earth.

What flat-earthers fail to mention is that this tree appeared in a dream of the pagan king Nebuchadnezzar. If it isn’t clear enough that this is not a literal tree, in Daniel’s interpretation of the dream (Daniel 4:17–27), Nebuchadnezzar was identified as that tree.

Flat-earthers similarly point to the temptation of Jesus found in Matthew 4:1–11, where Satan took Jesus to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world. Flat-earthers then reason again that this is possible only if the earth is flat.

They have no candidates because even on the flat-earth model, there are no mountains from which such a literal view is feasible. Moreover, flat-earthers generally don’t mention the other accounts of the temptation of Jesus (Mark 1:12–13.

There is good reason for their silence. The earliest manuscripts of Luke’s account don’t.

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As volcanic eruptions and earthquakes occasionally remind us, the earth beneath our feet is constantly on the move. Continental plates only move around 1-4 inches per year, so we don’t notice the tectonic forces that are continually reshaping the surface of our planet.

Today’s map, by Massimo Pietrobon, is a look back to when all land on the planet was arranged into a supercontinent called Pangea. Pietrobon’s map is unique in that it overlays the approximate borders of present day countries to help us understand how Pangea broke apart to form the world that we know today.

Pangea began developing over 300 million years ago, eventually making up one-third of the earth’s surface. The remainder of the planet was an enormous ocean known as Panthalassa.

Similar to parts of Central Asia today, the center of the landmass is thought to have been arid and inhospitable, with temperatures reaching 113ºF (45ºC). The extreme temperatures revealed by climate simulations are supported by the fact that very few fossils are found in the modern day regions that once existed in the middle of Pangea.

By this unique point in history, plants and animals had spread across the landmass, and animals (such as dinosaurs) were able to wander freely across the entire expanse of Pangea. Around 200 million years ago, magma began to swell up through a weakness in the earth’s crust, creating the volcanic rift zone that would eventually cleave the supercontinent into pieces.

The most visible evidence of this split is in the similar shape of the coastlines of modern-day Brazil and West Africa. Present-day North America broke away from Europe and Africa, and as the map highlights, Atlantic Canada was once connected to Spain and Morocco.

The Himalayas, for example, were formed after the Indian subcontinent broke off the eastern side of Africa and crashed directly into Asia. Many of the world’s tallest mountains were formed by this process of plate convergence – a process that, as far as we know, is unique to Earth.

However, for whatever life exists on Earth roughly 300 million years in the future, they may have front row seats in seeing the emergence of a new supercontinent: Pangea Proxima.

Interestingly, Pangea Proxima could have a massive inland sea, mainly made up of what is the Indian Ocean today. Meanwhile, the other oceans would combine into one superocean that would take up the majority of the Earth’s surface.

JOURNEYE OF THE The Northern Lights begin on the surface of the sun, frequently seen at the world’s highest latitudes. The splashes of coloured light come from nitrogen and oxygen mixing with the atmosphere, which in many cultures are a sign of good luck.

FORGET A TRIP AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, TAKE A JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH AND RE-TRACE THE STEPS OF PROF. OTTO LIDENBROCK IN JULES VERNE’S CLASSIC SCIENCE-FICTION NOVEL.

Iceland is a combination of staggering mountains, imposing glaciers, and crystal clear rivers and lakes, with nearly 24-hour daylight in summer and 24-hour darkness in winter. volcanic Called the Father of Science Fiction, Jules Verne also wrote epic classics 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days – predicting space, air and underwater travel long before they were invented.

The Earth is made of many layers – working from the outside in, they are: Crust, Upper Mantle, Mantle, Outer Core, Inner Core. 300 years prior, Arne Saknussemm left markings to find his way back from his own journey to the centre of the Earth, and the 3 parallel lines chiselled into rock help the team along the way.

Earth’s largest known cave passage is Vietnam’s Son Doong cave. Big enough to park a 747 inside, it’s yet to be fully explored.

A giant honey mushroom colony spanning over 2,200 acres in Oregon, USA is the largest reported living fungus, while the largest puffball mushroom was found by a schoolboy in England measuring a whopping 66.5 inches. UPPER MANTLE MANTLE Watch out for the giant Lizard.

A new species of giant lizard was discovered in the Phillipines, growing up to 2 metres long and weighing 10 kilograms. Lidenbrock and his team get sucked in – literally – when they chance upon a giant whirlpool in the underground sea where the magnetic forces of the North and South Poles meet.

Legend has it the city of Atlantis disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean some 2,300 years ago – since then, explorers and naysayers have searched for traces without any success. CORE Talk about close calls – after being pushed through a narrow shaft back to the surface of the Earth, the team end up in Stromboli, Italy – still the site of one of the world’s most active volcanos today.

It’s a long way down to the Earth’s core – about the same distance as the Amazon river. It’s pretty hot down there as well.

6,395KM 5,505°c DOWN FROM THE SUR FACE AT THE EAR TH’S CORE Start your own journey to the centre of the Earth in the place where it all began for Professor Lidenbrock and his crew in Iceland, the land of ice and fire, with Voyages Jules Verne. VOYAGES JULES VERNE.

Many people consider the great Pyramid of Giza to be one of the oldest, greatest and most perfect, and scientific ‘monuments’ on the face of the Earth, created thousands of years ago. However, many people are unaware that the Great Pyramid isn’t only an architectural and engineering marvel, it is a geographical one too: It is located at the exact intersection of the LONGEST LINE OF LATITUDE and the LONGEST LINE OF LONGITUDE.

According to experts, the Great Pyramid is the most accurately aligned structure ever created by human beings. It is said that the pyramid faces true north with a mere 3/60th of a degree of error.

But this isn’t even the most puzzling aspect of the geographical positioning of the pyramid. As an author with a vivid imagination I believe this latitude positioning is proof that it was constructed by an advanced ancient civilization.

Over one hundred shafts cut into the limestone bedrock over the Giza plateau brought in the water from the river Nile. Why they were creating energy … you need to read my book.

1) The builders possessed highly sophisticated knowledge of mathematics and geometry. 2) Had knowledge of the true dimensions of the earth to extreme precision.

There is simply no way that the precise positioning of the Great Pyramid was due to chance. And it is doubtful also that it was built as a local project purely for the local populous.

their aim being to achieve a very elegant mathematical connection between the pyramid itself, and the earth form. Perhaps the first interesting thing that one discovers about the Great Pyramid is that it is perfectly oriented to the four points of the compass – only being out by 3 arc minutes – a discrepancy of less than 0.06 percent.

29 degrees, 58 minutes, 51 seconds of arc – North (Latitude) 31 degrees, 09 minutes, 0 seconds of arc – East (Longitude). Of the two noted values, the latitude is of greatest significance, as the placement of the pyramid north of the equator is the very thing that forces one to conclude the builders knew the true and exacting dimensions of the earth.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is estimated to have around 2,300,000 stone blocks that range in weight from 2 to up to 30 tons each. Some of the blocks are estimated to have around 50 tons.

In my latest novel Last Secret Chamber I give my reasoning: why it was placed there and by who. Watch the Cinematic Book Trailer and Read a FREE Sample Chapter Here.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is the oldest monument of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and will always share a special place in my heart. Below are some pictures of me, taken on the Giza Plateau in 1997.

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Boston public schools recently announced that they will shift to using world maps based on the Peters projection, reportedly the first time a US public school district has done so. Why.

Although it distorts countries’ shapes, this way of drawing a world map avoids exaggerating the size of developed nations in Europe and North America and reducing the size of less developed countries in Asia, Africa and South America.

So the developed “global North” appears bigger than reality, and equatorial regions, which tend to be less developed, appear smaller. It’s especially problematic given that the first world maps based on the Mercator projection were produced by European colonialists.

Simply put, the world is round and a map is flat. Imagine drawing a world map on an orange, peeling the skin to leave a single piece and then flattening it.

But imagine you could stretch it. As you did so, the map drawn on its surface would distort.

And different projections distort maps in different ways. The Mercator projection depicts Greenland as larger than Africa.

It alters the way you see the size – and, some people argue, the way you see the importance – of different parts of the world. So this isn’t just a cartographer’s dilemma – it’s a political problem.

Accurate compass bearings are very important if you are a 16th century seafarer. But if you want a better idea of the relative size of the world’s landmasses, you need a map that distorts shape but preserves area, like the Peters projection does.

Here are four other map styles that each come with their own political implications. North is up, right.

There’s no scientific reason why north is any more up than south. Equally, we could do east-up, west-up or any other compass bearing.

But some of the first known world maps put south at the top as a matter of course. For example, in 1154 Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi drew a south-up map of Europe, Asia and northern Africa for his book the Tabula Rogeriana.

Another convention of world maps is that they are centred on the prime meridian, or zero degrees longitude (east-west). But this is scientifically arbitrary, deriving from the location of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.

The familiar meridian-centred map conveniently places the map edges down the middle of the Pacific Ocean so no continent is chopped in two. But maps centred on the Pacific Ocean also work well because the edges of the map conveniently run down the middle of the Atlantic.

Much of Oceania and Asia uses Pacific-centred maps. (American-centred maps are also in use, but these have the unfortunate consequence of partitioning Asia to either side of the map.).

“Far East”, for example, implies far from Greenwich, London. Seeing Europe on the left of a map and the Americas on the right can seem counter-intuitive, but it is just as correct as any other arbitrary chop point.

All the projections we’ve discussed so far tend to put one continent in the middle of the map, giving it greater prominence over the others. An alternative is to place the North Pole in the centre.

The lower hemisphere should be hidden from view by the curve of the Earth because you can only see half a sphere at a time. But on the azimuthal polar projection from the north, the southern hemisphere has been pulled into view on the page, with the consequence that Antarctica centrifuges into a doughnut around the edge of the circular map.

This “azimuthal” polar projection is depicted on the United Nations flag. North America was prominent on the initial 1945 UN flag (which had the longitude line 90 degrees west pointing upwards).

The map stops at latitude 60 degrees south, meaning Antarctica does not appear. Another way of representing the world is to display countries’ sizes in proportion to key indicators of interest to geographers today, such as population, environment and development.

The population cartogram gives greater prominence to India and China, and makes Indonesia far bigger than neighbouring Australia. But perhaps more surprising is the map of voter turnout, where emerging economies are bigger – and North America smaller – than many people might suppose.

Any one perspective is not any more correct than another – just different.

November 19, 2012. Posted by Evelyn Mervine.

the board game.

This is because some of our nerdy friends regularly get together to play board games such as Settlers of Catan, 7 Wonders, Agricola, and Puerto Rico. For awhile, we resisted buying our own games.

However, since I’m a big Star Trek fan (and my husband watches plenty of Star Trek, too), I just couldn’t resist acquiring this board game a couple of months ago: Star Trek Catan.

This past weekend, my husband and I went to a board game shop (one of the few such shops here in South Africa) to look for an expansion pack for “Star Trek Catan” to allow for more players. We found out that no such expansion pack exists yet, but we didn’t leave the game shop empty handed.

We both adore the “Journey to the Center of the Earth” story, including some of the various movie adaptations. Sure, the story isn’t scientifically plausible, but the story helped inspire us to become geologists, so we have a soft spot for it, bad science and all.

The good news was that the dusty game was on sale for only 1/3 of its original price. We were a little worried that perhaps the game was on sale because it wasn’t very fun, but we decided to purchase it anyway since it was such a bargain.

The game is actually very fun. The game is great for 2-person play and is challenging but not overwhelmingly complicated.

How could you not like this game. At the end of our first game, my husband and I tied each other with sixty fossil points each.

Overall, I highly recommend the game, especially if you are interested in geology. I think I’ll put the game on my forthcoming annual “What to Buy a Geologist for Christmas” list.

Here’s a couple more shots of the game: The back of the “Journey to the Center of the Earth” board game box, showing the game layout.

You collect these to win the game. Okay, I know that quartz and gold aren’t really fossils, but the game is still fun.

Posted in: fossils, geology games, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Monday Geology Picture No Comments/Trackbacks ».

Reportedly haunted locations:. The Hollow Earth is a concept proposing that the planet Earth is entirely hollow or contains a substantial interior space.

It was still occasionally defended through the mid-19th century, notably by John Cleves Symmes Jr. and Jeremiah N.

The concept of a hollow Earth still recurs in folklore and as a premise for subterranean fiction, a subgenre of adventure fiction. Hollow Earth also recurs in conspiracy theories such as the underground kingdom of Agartha and is often said to be inhabited by mythological figures or political leaders.

In ancient times, the concept of a subterranean land inside the Earth appeared in mythology, folklore and legends. The idea of subterranean realms seemed arguable, and became intertwined with the concept of “places” of origin or afterlife, such as the Greek underworld, the Nordic Svartálfaheimr, the Christian Hell, and the Jewish Sheol (with details describing inner Earth in Kabalistic literature, such as the Zohar and Hesed L’Avraham).

According to one story from Tibetan Buddhist tradition, there is an ancient city called Shamballa which is located inside the Earth.

In Thracian and Dacian legends, it is said that there are caverns occupied by an ancient god called Zalmoxis. In Mesopotamian religion there is a story of a man who, after traveling through the darkness of a tunnel in the mountain of “Mashu”, entered a subterranean garden.

In Celtic mythology there is a legend of a cave called “Cruachan”, also known as “Ireland’s gate to Hell”, a mythical and ancient cave from which strange creatures would emerge and be seen on the surface of the Earth. There are also stories of medieval knights and saints who went on pilgrimages to a cave located in Station Island, County Donegal in Ireland, where they made journeys inside the Earth into a place of purgatory.

In Hindu mythology, the underworld is referred to as Patala. In the Bengali version of the Hindu epic Ramayana, it has been depicted how Rama and Lakshmana were taken by the king of the underworld Ahiravan, brother of the demon king Ravana.

The Angami Naga tribes of India claim that their ancestors emerged in ancient times from a subterranean land inside the Earth. The Taino from Cuba believe their ancestors emerged in ancient times from two caves in a mountain underground.

Natives of the Trobriand Islands believe that their ancestors had come from a subterranean land through a cavern hole called “Obukula”. Mexican folklore also tells of a cave in a mountain five miles south of Ojinaga, and that Mexico is possessed by devilish creatures who came from inside the Earth.

In the middle ages, an ancient German myth held that some mountains located between Eisenach and Gotha hold a portal to the inner Earth. A Russian legend says the Samoyeds, an ancient Siberian tribe, traveled to a cavern city to live inside the Earth.

In Native American mythology, it is said that the ancestors of the Mandan people in ancient times emerged from a subterranean land through a cave on the north side of the Missouri River. There is also a tale about a tunnel in the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation in Arizona near Cedar Creek which is said to lead inside the Earth to a land inhabited by a mysterious tribe.

The elders of the Hopi people believe that a Sipapu entrance in the Grand Canyon exists which leads to the underworld.

Ancestors of the Inca supposedly came from caves which are located east of Cuzco, Peru.

: 137. Edmond Halley in 1692 conjectured that the Earth might consist of a hollow shell about 800 km (500 mi) thick, two inner concentric shells and an innermost core.

The spheres rotate at different speeds. Halley proposed this scheme in order to explain anomalous compass readings.

Le Clerc Milfort in 1781 led a journey with hundreds of Muscogee Peoples to a series of caverns near the Red River above the junction of the Mississippi River. According to Milfort the original Muscogee Peoples’ ancestors are believed to have emerged out to the surface of the Earth in ancient times from the caverns.

It is often claimed that mathematician Leonhard Euler proposed a single-shell hollow Earth with a small sun (1,000 kilometres across) at the center, providing light and warmth for an inner-Earth civilization, but that is not true. Instead, he did a thought experiment of an object dropped into a hole drilled through the center, unrelated to a hollow Earth.

In 1818, John Cleves Symmes, Jr. suggested that the Earth consisted of a hollow shell about 1,300 km (810 mi) thick, with openings about 2,300 km (1,400 mi) across at both poles with 4 inner shells each open at the poles.

He proposed making an expedition to the North Pole hole, thanks to efforts of one of his followers, James McBride.

Reynolds went on an expedition to Antarctica himself but missed joining the Great U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842, even though that venture was a result of his agitation.

Though Symmes himself never wrote a book on the subject, several authors published works discussing his ideas. McBride wrote Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres in 1826.

In 1868, professor W.F. Lyons published The Hollow Globe which put forth a Symmes-like Hollow Earth hypothesis, but failed to mention Symmes himself.

Sir John Leslie proposed a hollow Earth in his 1829 Elements of Natural Philosophy (pp. 449–53).

In 1864, in Journey to the Center of the Earth Jules Verne describes an expedition into the Earth’s interior via the fictional Icelandic volcano Scartaris. The protagonists do not actually reach the centre, but nevertheless discover a subterranean ocean inhabited by creatures believed extinct.

William Fairfield Warren, in his book Paradise Found–The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, (1885) presented his belief that humanity originated on a continent in the Arctic called Hyperborea. This influenced some early Hollow Earth proponents.

NEQUA or The Problem of the Ages, first serialized in a newspaper printed in Topeka, Kansas in 1900 and considered an early feminist utopian novel, mentions John Cleves Symmes’ theory to explain its setting in a hollow Earth.

He supported the idea of a hollow Earth, but without interior shells or the inner sun.

She claimed that cities exist beneath a desert, which is where the people of Atlantis moved. She said an entrance to the subterranean kingdom will be discovered in the 21st century.

Marshall Gardner wrote A Journey to the Earth’s Interior in 1913 and published an expanded edition in 1920. He placed an interior sun in the Earth and built a working model of the Hollow Earth which he patented (U.S.

Gardner made no mention of Reed, but did criticize Symmes for his ideas. Around the same time, Vladimir Obruchev wrote a novel titled Plutonia, in which the Hollow Earth possessed.

This article was originally published on Nov. 3, 2016.

Our maps have been lying to us for centuries. The standard classroom maps we all learned geography from are based on the Mercator projection, a 16th century rendering that preserved lines used for navigation while hideously distorting the true sizes of continents and oceans further from the equator.

In reality though, Africa is larger than all of North America, and the Antarctic is about as big as Australia. That’s the difficulty with stretching a sphere to fit a rectangle, and for centuries cartographers have struggled to balance maintaining straight latitudinal lines with the preservation of perspective.

Read more: 6 of the World’s Oldest Maps. For centuries, cartographers have made numerous attempts to account for the inconsistency while trying to recreate the most accurate map of the Earth.

Some were made for specific purposes, while others just tried to find the cartographic sweet spot. The problem was so widespread that a French mathematician even developed an eponymous equation to quantify the degree of distortion that a world map experienced.

By calculating how much each circle deforms, it is possible to determine how much the map is pulling and stretching the continents out of shape at that point. Here are a few of the different ways cartographers have tried to depict the Earth.

It succeeds in presenting a more accurate view of the poles, but at the cost of misshapen continents and bent meridians. Areas near both the equator and prime meridian are accurate, but the distortion gets worse the further you go from either.

The Robinson isn’t as extreme, however, taking the form of a much more gentle oval. The map was an attempt at a compromise between distorting the areas of continents and the angles of coordinate line.

A more outside-of-the-box example of mapmaking ingenuity, the Bonne Projection actually dates back to the 16th century. The heart shape preserves integrity near the center, but gets progressively more unrealistic as it moves outward.

This map attempts a kind of 3-D simulation by projecting the map onto a torus. This keeps the continents in decent shape while causing the oceans to appear smaller, and cutting off half of Australia and all of New Zealand.

Read More: 6 of the World’s Oldest Maps. We may finally have a faithful flat map, however.

Hajime Narukawa, a Tokyo-based architect and artist, broke the globe up into 96 regions and folded it into a tetrahedron and then a pyramid before finally flattening it into a two-dimensional sheet.

Their website states that the goal was to create a map better suited to address the problems of the 21st century, including rapidly diminishing sea ice and territorial claims of marine territory, by more accurately depicting what areas near the poles actually look like. Called the AuthaGraph, the result is a world map that looks a little different than most of us are used to.

The Americas and Africa are tilted inward and pushed to the upper corners of the map, while Australia sits perfectly upright at the bottom center. The lines of latitude and longitude veer in odd directions, the result of transformations that broke them from their naturally spherical configuration.

Read More: The Mystery of Extraordinarily Accurate Medieval Maps. Most importantly, the continents are all rendered as they actually appear.

The oceans, too, are finally represented accurately. By breaking long standing rules governing how the continents and lines of latitude and longitude should appear, Narukawa has achieved a geographically accurate depiction of Earth.

You can buy an origami version of his map composed of tiny segments separated by seams that folds from a globe to a sheet and back again. Narukawa says that his map is not quite accurate yet — some regions are slightly distorted.

Read More: Earth Actually Has Four North Poles.

Here is a simple thought experiment to consider. Suppose you are trying to measure your own height.

If we break this down, there are some important rules to follow (Figure 2.2): Figure 2.2: Diagram for measuring height above a datum.

Whenever you measure your height, the ground is easy to define. It is whatever point you are standing on.

A datum is simply a reference point, set of points, or a surface from which distances can be measured. It does not matter if you are below sea level, atop Mount Everest, or on the 30th floor of a skyscraper.

But what about measuring the height of terrain on Earth. Whenever we measure the height of Earth’s terrain above some reference surface, we are measuring elevation.

In order for elevation measurements to be comparable across the world, we need to define a reference surface, a datum, for the entire planet. There are actually several ways that we can model the shape of Earth in order to produce a datum.

A vertical datum is a 3D surface model that is used to reference heights or elevations for the Earth. A simple question like How high is Mount Logan in Yukon, Canada.

In this section, we will review three types of vertical datums: A geodetic vertical datum is one that describes the Earth’s shape in the simplest possible terms using standard geometry.

In fact, the radius of Earth varies by no more than 22 km or 0.35%, hardly anything you would ever notice if you were holding it in your hand. That small difference is, however, significant enough to lead to mapping inaccuracies at the local level if a spherical model of Earth was adopted (Figure 2.3).

Sometimes you will see the term spheroid used, which just means “sphere-like” and is interchangeable with the term ellipsoid. Figure 2.3: Spherical geodetic datum.

There are many different ellipsoids that have been defined and are currently in use as datums. The most commonly used ellipsoid is called the World Geodetic System of 1984 or usually abbreviated as WGS 1984 or WGS 84.

The reason for so many other ellipsoids is due in part to technological advances that have improved the accuracy and precision of surveying as well as estimation of the ellipsoidal parameters. Many of these ellipsoids are not geocentric, that is, not originating from the center of mass of Earth.

For example, the European Datum 1950, the South American Datum 1969, the North American Datum 1983, and the Australian Geodetic Datum 1966 conform well to their respective continents, even better than WGS 1984 in most cases, but poorly anywhere else in the world. Figure 2.4: Sphere versus ellispoid.

Figure 2.4 greatly exaggerates the flattening of the ellipsoid to illustrate the above points. In reality, the sphere is flattened using a flattening factor calculated as \(f=(CA-CG)/CA\) and defined exactly as \(f=298.257223560\) for WGS 1984.

\[ CG=CA-(CA×\frac{1}{f})=6378137-(6378137×\frac{1}{298.257223560})=6356752.3 \] where \(G\) is the North Pole and \(A\) is a point on the Equator. The sphere, of course, is much simpler where \(radius=CB=CA=6378137\).

The premise of a tidal vertical datum is to use mean sea level as a reference surface, above which are positive elevations and below are negative elevations. This has a lot of advantages, like it is intuitive and oceans cover more than 70% of the planet’s surface so much of Earth’s land mass is near an ocean.

The not-so-obvious problem with a tidal vertical datum is that the sea level is actually not constant around the planet not only due to tides, but also temperature, air pressure, and gravity. In other words, mean sea level measured at a gauge station in Halifax on the Atlantic Ocean will not be the same distance from the center of Earth as mean sea level measured at Victoria on the Pacific Ocean (Figure 2.5).

Figure 2.5: Conceptual tidal datum for Canada. Pickell, CC-BY-SA-4.0.

The geoid is a physical approximation of the figure of Earth. The shape represents Earth’s surface with calmed oceans in the absence of other influences such as winds and tides.

In other words, the geoid represents the shape Earth would take if the oceans covered the entire planet. More specifically, the geoid is a gravimetric model of Earth’s shape that is defined as an equipotential surface from a constant gravity potential value.

As a result, the surface of Earth’s oceans is not smooth like a sphere, but instead undulates depending on where gravity forces water to remain at rest. You can think of Earth’s gravitational field as a series of parallel lines extending outwards from the center of mass of Earth into space.

Keep in mind that the force of gravity is stronger nearer the center of mass of Earth and weaker as you move away from it. Thus, the geoid is an arbitrary equipotential gravity surface that is chosen to roughly coincide with present-day mean sea level.

Levelling forms a vertical line that is orthogonal or perpendicular to the geoid, known as a plumb line. It is incredibly easy to visualize a plumb line.

The length of the straightened string traces a plumb line to the center of mass of Earth, wherever you are. Because gravity changes with location on Earth and all plumb lines are converging on a singular point, plumb lines are never parallel.

In other words, the plumb line that you traced with your string is pointing to the center of mass of the geoid, but the center of the ellipsoid is often in a slightly different direction. This difference is known as the deflection of the vertical and is measured as the angular difference between the centre of the geoid and the centre of a reference ellipsoid.

It should be evident by now that the reference surface that you choose as a vertical datum will determine the measured elevation of Earth’s terrain. Additionally, We frequently need to convert elevations between geodetic and gravimetric vertical datums.

The difference in height between an ellipsoid and the geoid is referred to as geoid height (N) while the difference in height between an ellipsoid and Earth’s surface is referred to as geodetic or ellipsoidal height (h). The difference in height between the geoid and the Earth’s surface is called orthometric height (H) (Figure 2.6), and is given as:

Pickell, CC-BY-SA-4.0.

To illustrate the concept of a gravimetric datum, suppose we constructed a large, straight tunnel through the physical Earth that was tangential to the ellipsoid. If we allowed the oceans to flow freely through this tunnel, your experiences might convince you that water would flow from one end to the other.

Globe, map of the earth. A set of three options: Western Hemisphere, Eastern with a center in Europe and with a center in Asia.

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It’s impossible to flatten the Earth without distorting it in some fashion. Consider an orange peel: if you want to try and lay it flat, you have to stretch it, squash it, and tear it.

The good news is that map projections allow us to distort systematically. we know exactly how things are being stretched or squashed at any given point.

Some projections can even preserve certain features of the Earth without distorting them, though they can’t preserve everything. We often talk about map projections in terms of the ways in which they distort or preserve certain things about the Earth, which we call projection properties.

Notice how Greenland is about as big as South America on a Mercator projection. In reality, South America is eight times larger than Greenland.

On the other hand, one kind of projection that doesn’t distort area is the Cylindrical Equal Area. Notice here how Greenland looks the right size as compared to South America.

A map projection either preserves areas everywhere, or distorts it everywhere. This is an all-or-nothing property.

This projection does not preserve the “look” or the “form” of places. It stretches or twists or squashes them, instead.

Projections like this are called conformal projections. Under the hood, this property is actually a little more complex: comformal projections actually preserve local angles.

In the example below, Greenland is shown as it appears on three conformal projections (top row) and three non-conformal projections (bottom row). Notice how the conformal projections keep Greenland looking Greenlandy.

In the same way, a rectangle and a square have the same general “form” despite being different shapes, whereas a square and a circle do not. Like equal-area, this property is all-or-nothing.

A trip from Madison to Buenos Aires is much farther than a trip from Madison to Madrid. But on an Equirectangular projection, both of those trips looks like they’re the same length, because this is a projection that does not preserve distance.

There’s a catch, though. While we have map projections that can preserve areas or form everywhere on the map, there isn’t one that can preserve distances everywhere.

Distances to and from the center of an Azimuthal Equidistant map are shown correctly, but distances between any other two points are distorted. When a projection preserves distance, we call it equidistant.

That means that if you head due east on a straight line from New York, you’ll reach Istanbul. But that doesn’t mean that this is the shortest distance between the two cities.

But the curved line above it shows the way you should go if you’d like to travel the least distance while getting there. Because the Earth’s surface is curved, the shortest paths around it are curved, too.

Pin one end to New York and one to Istanbul, and pull the string taut. You’ll notice that the string covers the exact same path as the curved route in the map above.

On the other hand, a path like the straight line, where you keep yourself pointed in the exact same compass direction the whole time, is called a rhumb line or a loxodrome. Some projections, like the Mercator above, show loxodromes as straight lines.

Other projections show great circle routes as straight lines, making it easy to figure out the shortest distance between two places. The Stereographic projection is one of these.

These lines are the same as in the Mercator above, but the projection changes their appearance. When a projection preserves great circle routes as straight lines, we call it an azimuthal projection.

In the Stereographic above, the projection is centered on New York. Only straight lines coming into or going out of New York will be great circles.

If you skim through the example images above, you may notice that, as a general trend, distortions tend to get worse and worse as you get near the edges of the map. There’s usually one area that looks alright and isn’t too distorted, and then things start to get crazy the farther you move away from that area.

As a general rule, the larger the area your map shows, the worse distortions will be, especially as you move away from the center. What all this means is that we are most worried about distortions when we are doing things like mapping the world, and less when we are mapping smaller areas like cities or states.

These special projections represent trade offs: while most projections have minimal distortion in one area but distort heavily as you move away from that area, compromise projections distort a moderate amount everywhere. The Robinson projection is one example of a compromise projection:

The plus side of this is that no place gets ridiculously distorted. This is what makes compromise projections good for world maps.

This is why compromise projections should not be used for making maps of continents, countries, or most anything that’s not the whole Earth. Compromise projections spread the distortion more evenly throughout the world, but if you’re not showing the whole world, you don’t need to make the low-distortion areas of the map worse just so the high-distortion areas (which are off the edge of your map) are better.

They have a low level of distortion overall, even if they don’t preserve any one thing exactly. If the map you’re making requires that you preserve something specific like area, a compromise projection won’t meet your needs.

As you may imagine, the fact that there are so many means there is no “best” projection. Each has advantages and disadvantages and is better suited to certain situations.

Is there any specific property that you need to preserve. Remember that some projections will keep areas, forms, distances, or directions free of distortion.

Here are some examples: There are plenty of other reasons to preserve each of these properties.

Some other considerations: Once you know what projection you’re going to be using, there’s one final step.

Fortunately, we get to pick the place where distortions are minimal when we’re setting up a projection. This means we can always make sure that the subject of our map is the part that has the least distortion.

Take a look at these two maps, made with the Azimuthal Equidistant projection: Both use the same projection, but each one has different parameters.

They’re both still Azimuthal Equidistant projections, meaning they show distances correctly when measured out from the center of the projection, but they each have different center points. By adjusting this parameter, we can make sure that when we use a projection, it’s properly adjusted to show the area we want to map with minimal distortion.