"The Earth's curvature explains this phenomenon, as described in the diagram accompanying the photograph.
"The Andes Mountains, 287 miles away, and although taller than the plane's altitude, lay below the sensible horizon, marked by the white horizontal line in the photograph," NASA officials wrote in a description of the flight. In December 1930, for example, Stevens snapped a photo looking westward while flying at an altitude of 21,000 feet (6,400 meters) above Villa Mercedes, Argentina. Similarly, from a great distance, the tops of tall objects like mountains are visible well before their bases.Īnd Earth's curvature is clearly apparent from high altitudes, as Capt. If you've ever watched a ship on the horizon, you've seen this for yourself. There are so many experiments, observations and demonstrations that have, time and time again, revealed the curve of the Earth.Īs objects recede from you, they begin to look smaller and slowly disappear in a very unique way: first their bottoms become hidden, and then their tops. The news highlighted the need for a better, more accurate representation of planet Earth.To put it bluntly, we know more about the curvature of Earth than almost any other topic in the realm of physical science.
Scientists Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny developed the map after a "wave of news stories" about an announcement by Boston Public Schools that it would be switching to a new map projection for its classrooms. But while the Robinson map did not attempt to show equal areas, the new Equal Earth map does. It serves as an update to the Robinson projection, used to show the planet as a flat image.
The Equal Earth map projection was published earlier this year in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. Most notably, Africa always ends up appearing far smaller than it actually is, while other regions-including North America-are shown to be much bigger than they really are.īut now scientists have produced a new 2D map that accurately shows Earth and its continents. Ever since we discovered Earth was round, mapmakers have struggled to create a map that accurately shows our planet in 2D.
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