Is the Earth perectly round?

Question

Yes we all know the earth is a sphere but is it perfectly round? really boggles the mind when you think about it

Answer 1

No, the Earth is not perectly "round."

A sphere approximates the earth's shape to within one part in 300.

The Earth is an oblate ellipsoid with a flattening of 1/300.

Answer 2

It's flattened at the poles and a little lumpy around the mountains.

Answer 3

What do you mean? Of course it is round, it's not square:)

Answer 4

No, it's not.

So everytime you're feeling down, just think.. even the Earth isn't perfect.

Answer 5

No, most people don't know this but it's not. Did you know that when people actually suggested that the Earth wasn't perfectly round they accused them of being conspiracy theorists? Reminds me a lot of our government.

Answer 6

No, it's oblated due to it's rotation.

Answer 7

Egg shaped.

Answer 8

No. It's not perfectly round. It's an oblate spheroid.  The tops are flattened and the area near the equator bulges.

All objects over a particular size that rotate and are held together by gravity are oblate spheroids.

Answer 9

the only things in the universe that can be almost perfectly round are neutron stars.

Answer 10

No. It actually bulges slightly.

From the web: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. The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 km. 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.

The rotation of the Earth creates the equatorial bulge so that the equatorial diameter is 43 km larger than the pole to pole diameter. The largest local deviations in the rocky surface of the Earth are Mount Everest (8,848 m above local sea level) and the Mariana Trench (10,911 m 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.Because of the bulge, the feature farthest from the center of the Earth is actually Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.

Answer 11

1.  Like everyone else said, it bulges at the equator due to centrifugal force.

2.  Everyone forgot to mention the obvious:  It has mountains and valleys!

Answer 12

The earth is actually an oblate spheroid. It's about as close to a perfect sphere as you can get, due to the effects of the gravitational pull. The term oblate spheroid means that the earth is slightly flatter at the poles and slightly more bulging at the equator. This website explains it better than I can can:

http://regentsprep.org/Regents/earthsci/...

Answer 13

No. It bulges slightly.