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Debunking flat Earth claims

Showing the Earth is a globe

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  • Yachting World

    The June 18, 2019 edition of Yachting World carried the article ‘Back to basics: Offshore sailing by celestial navigation alone’ by Andy Schell. Flerfs have seized on the following paragraph from that article.

    In simplified terms, when we take a sextant altitude of the sun we’re creating a right angle triangle between it, the earth’s surface at the GP, and ourselves. Grade school geometry tells us that the two angles in a right-angled triangle must equal 90°.

    They claim that this proves celestial navigation uses a right angled triangle with flat sides in order to measure the elevation angle of a celestial object. One of the sides of this triangle is the earth’s surface, therefore the earth must be flat.

    Schell is clearly wrong, so why would he write this?

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  • Avenue Equatorial

    Google Earth image of Avenue Equatorial in Macapá, Brazil
    Avenue Equatorial. Credit: Google Earth.

    The Avenue Equatorial runs along the equator in Macapá, Brazil. We can use it to test ideas about the shape of the Earth. Anyone with access to Google Maps or similar navigational tools can verify this for themselves.

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  • Converging Lines of Longitude

    The Earth is a sphere, as confirmed by measurements of its surface. For centuries, its features have been mapped using the spherical coordinate system of latitude and longitude. The convergence of lines of longitude at the poles, instead of running parallel everywhere, clearly shows that the Earth is not flat.

    The following is an AI generated explanation of how meridians map to the surface of the Earth, showing it is spherical and kicking off this website.

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