This bulgy " ellipsoid" Earth isn't the whole story either.

这个膨胀的" 椭球" 地球也不是故事的全部。

Afterwards, it had become a Triaxal  Ellipsoid, similar to an oblong watermelon.

之后，它变成了一颗三轴椭球，类似于一个椭圆形的西瓜。

Others will say it's an oblate ellipsoid.

其人会说它是一个扁椭球。

And that's tricky to do because it turns out the Earth isn't a perfect ellipsoid either.

这做起来很棘手，因为事实证明地球也不是一个完美的椭球。

It's not a sphere, not an ellipsoid.

它既球，也椭球。

Then we said, no, it's this ellipsoid.

于是我又说，不，它是这种椭球。

But Newton's claim could be tested on an ellipsoid.

但牛顿的论在一个椭球上得到验证。

There'd be large swaths of the Earth that are just barely under the ellipsoid of some that are above it.

地球上有大片区域几乎都在椭球之下，有些则位于其上方。

They were also able to use this data to calculate the perimeter of this ellipsoid.

还能够利用这些数据来计算这个椭球的周长。

Ecuador's monument to the equator is 240m off, and the circumference of the ellipsoid that best matches Earth's actual shape isn't a perfect 40,000km.

厄瓜多尔的赤道纪念碑偏离了实际赤道线240米，而与地球实际形状最匹配的椭球的周长并精确的40,000公里，而是40,007.863公里。

And so in 1984, the US Defense Mapping Agency settled on an approximation, an ellipsoid centered exactly at the Earth's center of mass.

因此， 1984年， 美国国防制图局确定了一个近似值，即一个精确位于地球质心中心的椭球。

The material, which includes spherical, ellipsoidal, and dumbbell-shaped glass beads as well as colloidal items with a porous structure and sputtering material in fluid form, have also been found.

此外，还发现了球状、椭球状、哑铃状等形状的玻璃珠，及气孔构造的胶结质和流形态的溅射物。

These dense lumps of rock bump out from the ellipsoid and their mass gravitationally attracts oceans, while valleys in the ocean floor have less mass and the oceans flow away, shallower.

这些稠密的岩石块从椭球中碰撞出来，它的质量在引力作用下吸引着海洋，而海床上的峡谷质量较小，上方的海水也因此流走。

This is the ellipsoid we used today, the one that's published by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency And it's the foundation of the coordinate system used by GPS.

这是我今天使用的椭球，由美国国家地理空间情报局发布， 也是GPS所用坐标系统的基础。

And then with a bunch of trigonometry, they could figure out the distance from A to B. And this sort of arduous process proved that, yeah, the Earth was an ellipsoid.

然后通过大量的三角运算，能够计算出A到B的距离。 这种艰苦的过程证明了，是的， 地球是一个椭球。

Based on the distance between the cities, you can actually prove that that could be like a map of a sphere or like a spheroid, and you can actually calculate the radius of that planet.

根据城市之间的距离，你实际上证明那能是球或椭球的地图，并且你计算出那个星球的半径。