How Smooth Is The Earth, Really? Explore Elevation With An Interactive 3D Globe

14 comments

When it's at scale, they failed to rotate the globe and that irks me.
- It rotates when I look at it. Once you manually move it, it stops rotating, but the rotate checkbox gets it moving again.
  
  I'm confused because originally it just appeared to be a short animated gif on the post and if there was a link to the site, I didn't see it. Currently the post has a missing image and a link to the site. Weird.
I learned that the oxygen around the earth is about as thick as a coat of paint on a pool ball, relatively.

I'm not sure how accurate that is.
- Space is about 100 km up, on a sphere that has a radius of 6000 km, so some 2% is air.
  
  A pool ball has a radius of 30 mm roughly, so 2% of that is 0.6mm. Seems like a very thin coat of paint to me, but roughly correct.
  
  A coat of paint is like 0.045mm thick
- I was once told that if you scaled the earth and a glass marble to be the same size, the earth would have a much smoother surface.
Not take away the water!
- That wouldn't change the conclusion. Also, we probably don't have all the ocean floors mapped out.
i really love these relief maps.

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