100 Mind-Blowing Flatten Facts

Earth isn’t round. While this sounds like an elaborate joke, we’re serious. Earth isn’t flat, but it’s not perfectly round either. Earth’s rotation causes the planet to bulge at the equator and flatten at the poles, while the distribution of mass on Earth (which is not perfectly uniform) causes small variations in the gravitational pull at different locations on the planet. These variations are too small to be seen in pictures of Earth from space, so they appear round to the human eye. The shape seen in the video above is not technically the shape of the planet, but its ‘geoid’, the shape of its mean sea-level surface extending around the entire globe. The map was produced using data collected from ESA’s Gravity and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) and shows the most detailed map ever created of Earth’s gravity field.