July 16, 2011

shape of Earth: planet is getting fat

The Earth shape was tend to believe is flat.. we walk on it, along it, but we never found the edge. And so, it was found it is round. That is most common answer, that we learn being at primary school.
We see the images nowadays from satellites - nothing to question: round. But it was found, due to it's turning and force fields, it is a bit flatten on the south and north poles. And then the surface.. being so variant mountains to valleys.. it can't be so round. Technically for the representations and engineering calculations the "round" shape that called geoid was described mathematically with high precision. But the shape is changing all the time, mostly due to internal processes.

The biggest nowadays process, that people talk so much about is the climate changing or climate warmth (depends on what are focusing), that results in ice-caps melting. Melted water is gathered to the oceans and due to earth dynamics the water is being pulled towards the Equator, making the Earth more fat tells the dailymail.co.uk. The geophysics at the University of Colorado tells, that's not what was expected. Nowadays the rate of melting ice at the Poles is about 382 billion tons of ice per year.. And that since that weight of ice disappears flowing towards the Equator, the poles become more slimmer.

One could say that it doesn't change the Earth shape so much. It stays round, indeed.
But the shape of it is very important for determining the location, the location of position, the change of the position. Due to the change of the shape, the gravity center can slightly change, what will cause that the start point of the coordinate grid moves. And then the 'registered' position, which was referenced depending on the gravity center, changes it's location, although we standing on the surface wouldn't see if it changes.

Well, the global warming change the Earth step by step, they are huge, but not as much that would imbalance the Earth. Anyways, it is very interesting to follow such processes.

No comments:

Post a Comment