Friday, Jul 24, 2026 The claims desk. Receipts included. POWERED BY LENZ ↗
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SCIENCE

The Claim

The Earth is not a perfect sphere.

Verified by Lenz ·

The Short Version

Earth is measurably wider at the equator than from pole to pole, so it is not a perfect sphere. Authoritative geodesy sources describe it as an oblate spheroid or ellipsoid, and the real physical surface is even more irregular when modeled as the geoid. The small size of the deviation does not change the conclusion.

Caveats

  • The exact scientific description depends on context: Earth is often approximated as an oblate spheroid, while its gravity-defined shape is more precisely modeled as the geoid.
  • The deviation from a perfect sphere is small, so Earth can look spherical in images or everyday use; that visual approximation does not make the geometric claim false.
  • Low-authority social media sources in the evidence pool are not needed here because major scientific agencies already establish the fact.

The Receipts

  1. Space Geodesy: Charting the Size and Shape of the Earth

    NOAA Science On a Sphere

  2. Geodesy

    NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

  3. Geodetics

    NASA Earthdata

  4. Oblate Spheroids - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

    ScienceDirect

  5. New Gravity Map Reveals Lumpy Earth

    National Geographic

  6. The geoid

    European Space Agency (ESA)

  7. Equatorial bulge

    Wikipedia

  8. NASA's GRACE mission geoid map, a color-coded 3D model ...

    NASA (Instagram)

  9. Earth's Shape | Science | Research Starters

    EBSCO

  10. Earth's equatorial bulge shapes the planet's physics

    Astronomy Magazine

+ 19 more sources — see the full list on Lenz

Filed Under

Earth

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