Earth is round and high-altitude footage doesn’t prove Earth is flat

The Earth is not flat, and that is a fact roundly agreed upon by scientists. But a video on Facebook claims to show otherwise.

Text posted with the May 20 Facebook video said: "Compilation footage of 120,000k+ ft high altitude balloon shows a completely flat horizon proving the flat Earth and completely destroying the globe theory."

The video showed clips of clouds, oceans and rivers and what appears to be a flat line where Earth meets sky.

The Facebook video was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads, and Instagram.)

The Earth is not flat. Humans have known this for more than 2,000 years, and since then, scientists have improved our understanding of the Earth’s shape, including by collecting pictorial evidence from space that shows the planet is round. 

So, what does this video show? Flat-Earth theorists often use selected images from high-altitude videos to show a flat horizon. But even at lower altitudes than claimed in the video, Earth’s curvature is visible. For example, passengers in the retired supersonic Concorde plane, which could travel up to 60,000 feet, could see the Earth’s curvature. The curvature is sometimes visible at 35,000 feet, but that requires views devoid of clouds and a wide field of view, which most passenger airplane windows don’t have.

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Photos taken from the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth at an average altitude of about 250 miles (much higher than the balloons in the Facebook video), also show the Earth is round.

"Even though our planet is a sphere, it is not a perfect sphere," according to NASA. "Because of the force caused when Earth rotates, the North and South Poles are slightly flat. Earth’s rotation, wobbly motion and other forces are making the planet change shape very slowly, but it is still round."

Additionally, other planets are also round. "Through the use of high-powered telescopes, we’ve been able to examine planets both in our solar system and beyond, and all of them are spherical in shape," researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said.

PolitiFact previously debunked similar claims about the flat-Earth theory.

We rate the claim that this footage shows the Earth is flat Pants on Fire!

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