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But given the Earth is an oblate spheroid won’t the actual arc length of 1 degree of latitude be variable? Or does “reliably” just mean “close enough to be use
by Waterluvian 3y ago
But given the Earth is an oblate spheroid won’t the actual arc length of 1 degree of latitude be variable?
Or does “reliably” just mean “close enough to be useful”?
Gah. I’ve been doing non-geography work for far too long. I used to know this stuff.
- mholt 3y agoReliably means close enough to be useful, but the estimation is also quite precise where most populations live. My use case which led me to discover this fact is sort of documented here: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1695685022710477043 https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1695685022710477043 -- even if my use case did have whole kilometers of displacement, it wouldn't likely be near the poles, and if it was, the answer would be, "Meh, we get it, you're at the pole."
- ragazzina 3y agoThe Earth diameter at the equator is 43 km larger than at the poles. It's like the Earth orbit: we learn in school that it's an ellipse, but we are never actually given a sense of the shape, and most of the drawings give a completely wrong idea.
- hanche 3y agoThe title of the post could make you think that a degree of latitude varies by less than a decimeter, but that is of course not true. But close enough for many practical purposes, definitely.