Is the Earth flat ? A controversial- Theory

- Although scientific evidence says the Earth is a sphere orbiting the Sun, there are still some people who think our planet is flat.

Although the idea of the " Earth is flat" theory has been scientifically discredited, there seems to be growing belief in the conspiracy theory.

But this idea assumes that you'd be able to see the curvature across the image - left to right. The problem is that even when we look at the horizon, the size of the earth means that the curvature is very, very small. Over 10 km (wider than the view above) , the curvature would be less than 10 km from one side to the other. But if we look straight out at something 'beyond' the horizon eg a picture of a ship on a calm sea, around 30 km away in this case. The distant ship lies below the horizon , which only makes sense if if the surface is curved. When we loof from higher up (20m above the surface on the right), we can see further over the curvature, so the ship appears slightly higher.

These days, we also know that the earth isn't really a sphere - its slightly flattened oval, because of the fact that its spinning. It's also slightly lumpy, due to the variations in the density of the material it is made up of. We can measure this very accurately using satellites, which is important for all sorts of application including volcanoes, understanding climate and earthquakes. Oh, and of course , if the Earth wasn't a slightly flattened sphere, those satellites wouldn't be held in our orbit and would just disappear off into space.