Soundly Proving the Curvature of the Earth at Lake Pontchartrain

The people that believe in the curve will always see a curve, the ones who do not, won’t.

KaiserScience

Excerpted from an article by Mick West

A classic experiment to demonstrate the curvature of a body of water is to place markers (like flags) a fixed distance above the water in a straight line, and then view them along that line in a telescope. If the water surface is flat then the markers will appear also in a straight line. If the surface of the water is curved (as it is here on Earth) then the markers in the middle will appear higher than the markers at the ends.

Here’s a highly exaggerated diagram of the effect by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1870, superimposed over an actual photograph.

This is a difficult experiment to do as you need a few miles for the curvature to be apparent. You also need the markers to be quite high above the surface of the water, as temperature differences between the water and…

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