Science & Tech
Jake Brigstock
Jun 27, 2024
Underknown - Shorts / VideoElephant
A man has ingeniously used a photo of Lake Michigan near his hometown to prove that Planet Earth is not flat.
Despite huge waves of evidence to the contrary, some people still believe Planet Earth is indeed flat.
But Greg Pagel has taken to Imgur to show how Planet Earth cannot be flat using a picture taken near where he lives; he's even created a video of this on YouTube.
The picture shows Lake Michigan in Manitowoc, Wisconsin with the beach at Silver Creek Park in the distance on the right - to the left is the south side of Two Rivers.
In further pictures, he explained the landscape looked flat in all the photos, even when he took a panoramic view of the scenery looked flat.
Using Google Earth, made up of images taken from a satellite in space that shows Planet Earth is round anyway, the two points of Two Rivers and Silver Creek Park are 8.4 miles apart.
Curvature of Lake Michigan based on Round Earth Modelwww.youtube.com
Using the quantity that Planet Earth is 25,000 miles in circumference, 8.4 miles of that arc would equate to 0.12 degrees in angle.
He then posted a number of pictures showing how a right angle looks, a 45 degree angle and then a one degree angle.
On a pie chart, which is 360 degrees, a one degree angle looks fairly straight, even when the picture is zoomed in, which Pagel illustrated.
A 0.12 degree angle he showed is then barely noticeable at all, explaining why the landscape can look flat in photos and to the naked eye.
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