Reply #23: You're right...

[BrotherBuzz]

I'm from the old school, and it was flat in my days. Interesting, they just noticed it in the last four years:



The Earth: Now it's all going pear-shaped


American scientists say the Earth has suddenly become fatter round the middle in the
last four years.

Like a pumpkin, the planet is a little bit wider around the equator than a perfect sphere
would be.

For 19 years its waistline shrank, but since 1998 it has been expanding, according to a
study in the journal Science.

Christopher Cox and Benjamin Chao noticed the bizarre phenomenon after studying
space-based observations from the past 25 years.

They found that a measurement of the Earth's width called J2, which excludes tidal
effects, has generally been decreasing for most of that time.

The main reason is that the melting of the ice caps has caused the mantle - the thick
layer of nearly-molten rock between the crust and the Earth's core - to rebound.

But they subsequently discovered that around four years ago the Earth's "dynamic
oblateness"- its girth - began to increase.

The study adds that the trend is continuing to the present day.

According to their calculations, neither global sea level rise nor faster melting of
glacial ice could have produced such a sharp change.

Mr Cox, of Raytheon Information and Scientific Services, and Nasa scientist Mr Chao
suggest that shifting of mass at the boundary between the Earth's core and the mantle
may be responsible.

www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_641795.html?menu=news.sci...