What Does The World Look Like?

Planet Earth looks like a sphere from space

The world is shaped almost like an oblate spheroid, though the exact shape (the geoid) will vary by up to 100 meters. About 71 per cent of the world's surface is covered by salt-water oceans, while the remainder is made up of continents and islands. There is the standing joke that when seen from space the world looks almost completely blue, leading to the suggestion that it should be named 'water', not 'earth'.

The equator is seen to bulge out slightly as a result of the rotation of the Earth. The equatorial diameter is thus 43 km bigger than the diameter from pole to pole.

Mount Everest at 8,850 m above the local sea level and the Mariana Trench which is 10,924 m below the local sea level comprise the largest local deviations that are found on the Earth's surface. Hence the Earth, as compared to a precise ellipsoid, has a tolerance of around one part in approximately 584, or 0.17 per cent.