This Geoid Earth

As I was reflecting on the 20 years of broadcasting on Ground Zero, every conspiracy theory that makes up the 70 or so well known conspiracies have been talked bout on this show. Paranormal and Fortean views have always been spoken of on the air. Except for the granddaddy of conspiracy theories. This conspiracy theory is probably the one that would get the most mocking, probably more so than any discussion on the faked NASA Moon landings.

I am talking about the idea that the earth we live on is flat.

We have been taught that the height of stupidity and naiveté was when our ignorant ancestors believed the Earth to be flat, and that if any man somehow still thinks the Earth to be the immovable center of the universe, that they must be the most primitive kind of ignoramus.

Nowadays, the label “Flat-Earther” has become literally synonymous with “moron” and is a common cliché derogatory term for insulting someone’s intelligence. Upon seeing a book titled “The Flat Earth Conspiracy” your ingrained instinct is likely to laugh, mock the messenger, and deny the very possibility.

If the greatest secret is that our Earth is flat then this means that Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, along with their modern Masonic astro-not counterparts like Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins, hand-in-hand with NASA and world Freemasonry have pulled off the greatest hoax, propagated the most phenomenal lie, and perpetuated the most complete indoctrination in history.

It is interesting to learn that in the 21st century that there are many people who are willing to go against some hundreds of years of normalcy bias and say that the earth is flat. The truth is that we have taken for granted that what we first learned from Copernicus was all true even though Martin Luther and even Calvin used the Bible to try to ward off such cosmic blasphemy.

We know from everything from books, magazines, and television to computer-generated imaging, that this multi-generational conspiracy has succeeded, if it is such a conspiracy and that in the minds of the masses, the fixed Earth is shaped like a perfect sphere and looks just like the globe we used in grade school.

The idea of a sphere Earth actually goes back to Pythagoras of Samos.

Isidore of Seville between 615-630 AD describes the Earth as a sphere.

According to Isidore, the word mundus (world) originates from motus (motion). He divides the world into five zones (belts) which he describes as circles drawn around the sphere of the world, and they include polar and equatorial regions.

He also explains that the world has an axis, a straight line from the North that extends through the center ball of the sphere, called “axis” because around it the sphere turns like a wheel axel.

He even writes about the sun traveling through the Milky Way.

However, anciently the bible indicates that when God made the earth it appeared to the prophets as flat and that above it was a firmament or dome. Very early Egyptian and other Middle-Eastern civilizations portrayed the Earth as flat land suspended in an ocean, and with a “roof” of some kind over it. This is particularly reflected in some of the prose that made its way into the Bible and has been used to justify flat-Earth beliefs today.

“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.

And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.” — Book of Genesis.

The Bible describes a fixed, flat Earth, around which the Sun, Moon, and stars revolve. The Bible also talks about a great deception that Satan would enact in the final days, which would result in people increasingly abandoning God and the Bible, a hoax that would “deceive even the very elect!”

While armchair biblical readers will tell you that the great deception is the announcement of extra terrestrials, others say that deception is very much terrestrial and that is the great hoax has been that the earth is not what it appears to be.

Ancient Chinese astronomy makes no mention of any roundness of the Earth, indeed some depictions made it square.

Believe it or not there have been many Ground Zero listeners who have wanted to hear the flat earth conspiracy. In planning meetings we debated the approach of being messenger instead of believer and the process of expanding one’s mind to a new way of understanding why the flat earth beliefs are starting to gain ground again.

The Lufthansa German wing airbus crash gave me pause to reopen the case of geomagnetic conductive crust theories about mountain ranges like the Alps that Andes and the Himalayas. GOCE satellite imagery and geo-sat mapping started to make the case for a bulge or anomaly in areas of the planet that are prone seismically to gravimetric waves. The waves are rare and can create magnetic waves above the earth and waves that can generate earthquakes or other anomalous activities.

It is all based on the available seismic, gravimetric and geologic data from the past years, It is quite probable that gravimetric distortion waves are possible over many mountain ranges that have a electromagnetic conductive crust.

I also was curious as to the effect CERN may have as it is conducting its experiments.

Even though a suicidal pilot was the reported cause of the air bus crash, there was a report that there was a huge positive charge detected some 300 miles away from CERN in a place called Locarno and that tremors and booms were heard in the region where the plane went down.

Also on Wednesday April 1st, 2015 three people were killed and about seven others remain unaccounted for after an avalanche triggered by a small tremor came down in the same area where the doomed airplane crashed.

The question I am sure you are wondering is what does this have to do with flat Earth?

Well nothing directly however, The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (Goce) that was launched into space March 2009, lies pole to pole at an altitude of just 254.9km — the lowest orbit of any research satellite in operation today.

The satellite maps the almost imperceptible differences in the pull exerted by the mass of the planet from one place to the next from the great mountain ranges to the deepest ocean trenches.

It creates a map of the planet. However it is not very flattering. The mapping indicates that the planet we live on is not exactly as perfect f a circle as we might think. In fact scientists call the shape of the earth, a geoid shape.

A geoid actually looks like a distorted flattened basketball — the earth still looks “spherical” but with a few bulges and flat areas that make our round earth look more like the shape of a wadded chewed piece of blue bubblegum or a rolled imperfect ball of pizza dough.

What happens if you take a ball of pizza dough in your hands and begin spinning it in the air? As the dough spins around in quick circles, centrifugal forces tug at the sides of the dough. This causes it to become flatter and flatter. The sides of the ball push further out until you have a flat disk rather than a ball.

This in my opinion is the only possible foot a flat earth believer has to stand on.

We assume the earth is round, because of distance and overall appearance. Speed and orbit along with a lack of distance pictures could give the impression that the world is flat.

Many topographic differences also affect the overall shape of the Earth. From the lowest place on the surface of the Earth, the Mariana Trench, to Mount Everest, the highest mountain peak on our planet, there is a sizeable difference in height. The Mariana Trench, which lies at the bottom of the ocean, is 35,810 feet (10,915m) below sea level. Mount Everest is 29,028 feet (8848m) above sea level. This is a difference of 64,838 feet, or roughly 12 miles (19km).

While this difference seems very large on a human scale, in reality, it is miniscule. If, for example, the Earth were the size of a basketball, it would be difficult for someone to find the bump that represented Mt. Everest, or to find the fold that represented the Mariana Trench. They would both be smaller than the thickness of a piece of paper. If all the mountains, valleys, and streams were accurately represented on the basketball, it would still feel very smooth to the touch.

Most scientists love to explain something simple with a needlessly complicated theory. In this case, they have unwittingly fallen into a possible position to open the door for a resurrection of what can be called the age old conspiracy of the flat earth.

While there have always been, and likely will continue to be people who steadfastly maintain that the Earth is flat, this is clearly an eccentric position. And yet, the most common representations of the Earth are flat maps. Thousands of years of effort have been put into flat representations of the Earth, and many of the techniques used are highly sophisticated and still quite valuable today.

So far, we have made the simplifying assumption that the Earth is a perfect sphere. Looking at the many bumps and hills we see, this is clearly not the case. Although a topographic map roughly describes these, clearly we cannot accurately model every minor bump: not only are they too numerous, they change too rapidly. However a topographic reality gives us flat areas of the earth clinging to a huge dough ball that is sped around to appear flat.

I believe the halfway point is the geoid, which is a theoretical construct defined as a surface of equal gravitational potential. If we ignore other forces, a body of water will flow so that its surface has equal gravitational potential. This means that on the ocean, the geoid closely matches mean sea level. Elsewhere, the surface of the Earth may rise or fall above or below the geoid. Although a large mass like a mountain causes the geoid to deviate somewhat, the geoid often lies far from the surface of the Earth.

This geoid earth is an irregular structure that has no concise mathematical description. From careful measurements, a close approximation can be described by using spherical harmonics. Working with the resulting model can be very complex. Instead, for most applications, an ellipsoidal model of the Earth is more than sufficient. A best-fit ellipsoid for the Earth is about .3% shorter than it is wide, and differs from the geoid vertically by about 100 meters at worst. Despite its lumps, the geoid is a bunch ellipsoidal flat circles.
So is the earth flat? Yes in some places. Is it round? Yes, at its best, at the equator.

Is spinning and distance part of the illusion that the Earth is a perfect sphere? I guess if you use the pizza dough analogy.

If you wonder about my opinion about the flat Earth, I can leave you a quote from one of my heroes Charles Fort.

“If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.”

The principles of Zen tell us that not all messages are meant to be understood, so using circular logic, it is better to ponder and appreciate pure form and elusive mystery.

Tonight, Clyde speaks about different theories of the shape of the Earth, and talks to flat Earth theorist Mark Sargent.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org