#2 All the folks commenting were wrong. Flat and round are 2d concepts. The world is a 3d shape.
From Wikipedia:
The Earth's shape is very close to an oblate spheroid—a rounded shape with a bulge around the equator—although the precise shape (the geoid) varies from this by up to 100 meters (327 ft).[22] The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 km (7,913 mi). More approximately the distance is 40,000 km/π because the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole through Paris, France.[23]
The rotation of the Earth creates the equatorial bulge so that the equatorial diameter is 43 km (27 mi) larger than the pole to pole diameter.[24] The largest local deviations in the rocky surface of the Earth are Mount Everest (8,848 m [29,028 ft] above local sea level) and the Mariana Trench (10,911 m [35,798 ft] below local sea level). Hence compared to a perfect ellipsoid, the Earth has a tolerance of about one part in about 584, or 0.17%, which is less than the 0.22% tolerance allowed in billiard balls.[25] Because of the bulge, the feature farthest from the center of the Earth is actually Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.[26]
|