by Triple B » Wed Feb 20, 2008 6:52 pm
I think you are correct Xas.
I just looked it up on wiki again:
The Earth's shape is very close to an oblate spheroid—a rounded shape with a bulge around the equator—although the precise shape (the geoid) varies from this by up to 100 meters.[30] The average diameter of the reference spheroid is about 12,742 km. More approximately the distance is 40,000 km/π because the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole through Paris, France.[31]
The rotation of the Earth creates the equatorial bulge so that the equatorial diameter is 43 km larger than the pole to pole diameter.[32] The largest local deviations in the rocky surface of the Earth are Mount Everest (8,848 m above local sea level) and the Mariana Trench (10,911 m below local sea level). Hence compared to a perfect ellipsoid, the Earth has a tolerance of about one part in about 584, or 0.17%, which is less than the 0.22% tolerance allowed in billiard balls.[33] Because of the bulge, the feature farthest from the center of the Earth is actually Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.
Villain: Why?
Villain: How?
Me: I had a feeling
Villian: Sit in you cretin