Flat Earth? No ! No!

Interesting ! My first blog as an official Ph.D. candidate in Geography program in a US university is going to be to find whether the earth is flat or round. I am from Nepal and never challenged the notion that the earth is spherical and that was what we were taught. After I came to the US to continue my tertiary level education, I encountered many news and views especially on the internet that Earth might be flat. I got more tempted to understand this conflicting views after I read a news story about  the earth being flat on the website of The Imaging and Geospatial Society of America,  (ASPRS). In this news, they reported 600-year-old map and tried to persuade that  the earth might be flat. Even one of the ASPRS members was cited in the news with a view that the earth might be flat.

Very amusing! Isn't it? That was an April fool prank.

And then I also started doubting! Haha!

Not really!

I had a few basic understanding that earth is not flat, it is spherical.

I started to explore about this discussions and debates on the internet. I typed in the Google –'Is earth flat?' Google showed almost 97 million records. Coincidently, it was a day after NASA's satellite Juno reached the orbit of Jupiter as you can see from the Google logo in the screenshot.

I noticed that a revival of flat earth notion is very recent as some mainstream media started reporting about a very conservative group called the Flat Earth Society. The Flat Earth Society seems to be rejuvenated around the end of 2015 and early 2016 as their last tweet is dated February 4, 2016 by the time this piece was written. There happened to be division among themselves and there are many different flat earth societies. Another believer of the flat earth named Enclosed World was active until the June of 2016.

There happened to be even a book titled Earth Not a Globe written by Samuel Birley Rowbothan. This book is being used as a holy book of the flat earth believer. In this book author claims that ' the Zetetic Sun, moon, planets and stars are all only a few hundred miles above the surface of the earth. The sun orbits the north pole once a day at a constant altitude. The moon is both self-illuminated and semi-transparent. Eclipses can be explained by some unknown object occulting the sun or moon'.

Apparently, the spherical structure of the earth was discovered 2300 years ago by a Greek philosopher Eratosthenes. He was even able to calculate the circumference of the earth with a comparable accuracy as of modern measurement. A scientific blog has a video  of his experiment with a red pomelo fruit. There are numerous 'not so technical' explanations available in the web including ten reasons  by Popular Science Blog.They point out that Aristotle's observation of the lunar eclipse being the shadow of earth shows that the earth is spherical. There is other easily observable phenomenon like all the other planets in the solar system is spherical, and there is no point to believe that the earth is an exception. And, of course, there are millions of pictures of the earth available which were taken from outer space. None of them show that the earth is flat.

Finally, we wouldn't need a map projection in Geographic Information System if the earth was flat. The followers of the flat earth phenomenon tend to believe that the map of earth in the United Nations logo as the close representation of the flat earth. Please, someone, tell them that it is also a type of map projection called  azimuthal equidistant projection of the spherical earth. The official explanation of the logo also tells the same thing that  the design is "a map of the world representing an azimuthal equidistant projection centered on the North Pole".

You have right to doubt. You wish to remain stupid forever! Up to you.