Water mountains are my new favorite concept
I think they’re onto something. In fact, these water mountains seem to be so common, it might just be one big water mountain that covers the whole planet, and is so big it eventually wraps around and meets itself at the bottom.
No no no. That would NEVER work! See, what’s actually happening is the lizardmen are driving these ships, and taking them to the pirate ports where they sell everything. Thats when they buy evrn MORE drugs, and Steve said I can have some of the drugs. So I started eating these gummies, but it turns out they’re just regular gummy bears. They’re still good though. I would trade you some of my gummy bears for some actual gummies, but I have misplaced my pants…
There are “hills” on the sea. I doesn’t prove that Earth is not also round.
Yep. This is due to variations in the gravitational magnitude at any point from the earth, moon, sun, and other bodies, as well as the periodicity of the earth/moon/sun rotations interacting with friction (between the sea and the sea, the sea and the atmosphere, and the sea and the lithosphere), and creating a giant standing wave (which is constantly changing, like an instrument or a musical composition) of ocean water all over the earth. This doesn’t even take into account atmospheric pressure and water temperature/viscosity variations. The earth is a complex system with waves upon waves upon waves of interacting coupled oscillations all interfering with each other. Whoa 😳
Always amazed me how such insignificant creatures, bacterium on the scale of the earth, can have such a big impact on the environment.
Phytoplankton produce 50-85% of all the oxygen on Earth, and cyanobacteria did even more before them. Before all this free oxygen could float around in the air, all the metals in the ocean had to be oxidized, which is where the massive banded iron formations come from, and then all the minerals in the crust had to oxidize too. Every layer of Earth’s surface was radically changed by this, taking a billion years and likely prompting the evolution of eukaryotes.
And more. Major river discharge can raise the sea level in the area. Then big circular currents similar like when you stirr your cup of coffee or tea. Or chocolate milk 🤤
like an instrument or a musical composition) of ocean water all over the earth.
Somebody way better at music should find a way to turn that into music.
Shhh.
You’re gonna make their brains hurt.
TIL, thank you
Isn’t that how tides work? The hills move? I’m probably all wrong
It’s all about gravity and then some.
The tides and ordinary waves caused by wind will appear as moving hills.
The daily tides happen from the moon pulling the water towards the line between the moon and earth. This forms the tides that go around the globe everyday. It happens on both sides of the globe, like this:
The topological map shows something else than tides and moving waves though.
The globe isn’t perfectly round. It’s shaped like an irregular geoid, almost shaped like an ellipsoid, but not exactly. The ocean surface topological map takes the usual tides in account and maps the surface in relation to the geoid, so it shows where the water level is higher or lower than it would be if it was perfectly distributed.
The earth’s gravitational field is not perfectly regular, so it will pull more water towards certain areas, and there are things like ocean currents and the regular trade winds happening from Earth’s rotation, all shaping the sea in hills and valleys that are not just waves. These variations span large areas and doesn’t appear as much in relation to the tides. It basically just goes to show that sea level is not at all level. For instance, the east coast of USA has a higher sea level than the west coast. If sea levels should rise from melting ice, it is therefore more likely to spill over the east coast than the west coast.
Wait I have a meme for this (and absolutely no one is surprised):
Yeah, Mount Horizon covers the entire planet
This is what fundamental scientific illiteracy gets you.
When you have no reference point for how the world around you works anything makes sense.
Flat earthers 10 years ago in school: “when am I ever going to need to know the difference between a plane and a sphere in the real world?!”
Nah it’s just trolling and people like you overreacting and feeding the social media machine, Zuck et al. love it
It’s been 10 years, it’s not trolling.
I only feed the Lemmy social media machine. I bet I have cost instance admins entire pennies!
They have to be trolling, right? There’s no way a flat earther thinks water can bend like that.
“the earth is flat since water is always level, oh except water mountains”
Actually, i could imagine a flat earther would say that now that i think about it
Yeah, you’re right. Why am I expecting any soft of consistency in their train of thought. lol
What is a tide if not a wide and mobile water hill?
Also nowadays we have such accurate satellites that we can actually see the tiny increases in elevation of the sea level that reflect the topology of the sea floor.
Satellites notice the tiny “water mountains” which indicate the topology of the sea floor, and then they scan the place better with equipment on boats.
But yeah, I really think “water mountains” is a bit on a exaggeration to that phenomena.
Yes. And I love that picture.
The “gummy squirrel”? Damn, marine biologists get to have all the fun naming all these animals on top of spending so much time at sea! I’m starting to regret my life choices.
Snot sea cucumber https://australian.museum/learn/animals/sea-stars/snot-sea-cucumber/
Now that you asked, I wonder how flat earthers explain tides.
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They don’t
water mountains
…water mountains…
like… gotta be a troll. please.
I want to know there isn’t a single person on this planet that is that fucking dumb.
Is a tide not a kind of water hill?
imagine if you could, a water mountain or hill as frozen in time… you could wave at it, right?
There no way an earther could water bend either, unless they’re the avatar or something.
Goddamn weebs gonna weeb. (Avatar <3 )
It’s an American series I think.
Yup, Nickelodeon original.
Oh you sweet summer child. If they understood basic physics they wouldn’t be a flat earther.
There’s no way a flat earther thinks
That’s all you need to remember.
Welp I’ll never see that atrwork the same ever again.
Temporary water mountains don’t count.
How about permanent?
Not sure how permanent these are nowadays.
The thickest ice mountain in Antarctica is almost 5km high. I believe it will last for a bit.
Bubba & Jimbo said they can roll enough coal in their lifted Ford F-950 to melt all the glaciers this weekend.
Sounds like a plan!
All mountains are temporary, it’s just a matter of timescale
(edit: fun fact, the Appalachian mountain range is older than trees!)
Appalachian mountains and the Scottish Highlands predate the Continental Drift, and are technically the same mountain range, they also predate sharks and bones.
True. We need to ask that person how long a wave needs to last before it becomes a water mountain. I’ll tentatively say a year?
Everything is temporary, in fact.
I believe in water mountain. Just one of it. And it’s round. That’s why ships always disappear the same distance away if your height is the same, and why they disappear further away if you’re higher up, again with a predictable relationship. The water mountain surrounds two thirds of the earth, and goes all the way around the round earth.
I don’t think this guy got the memo: the flat earth argument is that water finds its own level. “Large bodies of water don’t curve” as they say.
They believe that the ships don’t actually disappear and that the strong zoom of a Nikon P1000 can actually bring ships back from behind the “curve”.
They’re a very special set of people 👍
strong zoom of a Nikon P1000 can actually bring ships back from behind the “curve”.
wow, observation effects, these people are quantum idiots.
I thought they only believe their own eyes
dO yOuR oWn ReSeArCh!
Yo I think I gotta add this to my D&D campaign setting
I’m imagining you ruining your players’ suspension of disbelief by including something that real people in the real world really believe.
I hope it doesn’t! I hope they see it or hear of it and are intrigued. Maybe they wonder if something exciting is going on there, and want to check it out.
Idk yet, but they’re probably resulting from a leak from the elemental plane of water, or a leyline nexus or something there and water magic is stronger there and so there is a flotilla of wizards trying to study it under the harsh conditions. Or it could be a hole in the world and somewhere else there is a big whirlpool, and the wrecks get spit out at the top of the water mountain and there is a whole culture of salvagers who explore the turbulence and dive for treasures. Maybe an empire of sea elves has been magically growing it for decades with the intention of using it as a weaponized tsunami so they can raid and conquer farther inland. I love irl conspiracy shit like this that asks more questions than it answers, because in a fantasy setting the answers get to be cool.
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Don’t try to apply logic to their argument.
They don’t understand it, and it’s mean to talk over their head. /s
Also, no matter where you are on Earth, that water mountain is always juuuust over there.
Well, under certain conditions, it does.
From shore it looks like the ship goes up doesn’t it? But what is happening when you’re on a boat and go on the ocean.? Maybe the water mountains are like silicon breasts as you ride along them they depress under the weight?
Mother Earth’s fake boobs
Maybe it’s that the land is on top of the water mountain/ plateau? And as the ships sail away they descend from the plateau? Maybe it’s the gravity of the land that causes the water to bunch up near the land? Maybe the earth is actually spherical? Wait no not that last one…
Ken M, is that you? (i hope so!)
Awh man I miss Ken M
Do you mean Ken Ham? Oo
It’s pretty impressive when you troll so hard and so prolifically that Wikipedia gives you an article.
Not to mention he’s actually funny, not a dick.
Oh, today I learned!
I have never met a flat earther, but if I did and she was hot I’d see what else I could convince her to believe.
It’s fantastic for the skin, I swear, I saw it in Oprah.
I hope that’s a reference I don’t get
So, no reference? You’re just a rapist? The post didn’t even mention women
There’s a simple reason why you have to make up water mountains to picture the horizon:
Scale issue.
More like skill issues
I refuse to accept ships disappear behind something because I have never seen a ship disappear behind anything.
In my extensive experience of watching ships (I live near the coast and near a nationally significant port), I find that by the time they’re far enough away to be disappearing, they’re also small, indistinct and hazy. I can’t honestly tell you that in many years of looking, I’ve ever seen a clear cut case of the bottom of the ship disappearing before the top. It’s all very indistinct indeed.
If you want to convince flat earthers, the ship past the horizon thing isn’t going to do it.
Really? I’ve seen it firsthand quite often. It’s very obvious when you’re in a kayak, because you’re so low to the water.
Yes. Really. I find it hard to believe that people can see that clearly at the sea horizon, because I just don’t.
Maybe it’s just hazier in my part of the world, and I mainly stand or sit on the shore. The sea is very cloudy round us, whereas I know it’s crystal clear on some parts of the world. But part of me still thinks you think you saw what you think you saw because I’ve genuinely tried to see it and can’t make out the detail. Maybe it’s just that most of the boats I watch to the horizon are oil tankers, and they’re just not very tall compared to their length.
Yeah, nowadays most places where people usually see ships are so polluted that they can’t see them disappear. Also, ships are so large that you have to look a the details to notice them decreasing.
The same applies to the stars, people just can’t see them anymore, so they never notice them rotating. People also do not navigate by the Sun anymore.
People nowadays are so disconnected from Earth that they do indeed have no problem believing it’s flat.
Nope, I’ve definitely seen parts of a ship disappear. You can see the bridge and superstructure, then the upper parts of the hull, and then the whole boat. Under good conditions, you can quite clearly see the bridge, but not the rest of the vessel.
This would have been even more obvious in the age of sail.
This would have been even more obvious in the age of sail.
I bet it would!
Imagine if we had some kind of tool we could use to see far away…
There is no convincing them through any kind of logic or observation. The logical proof of the shape and size of the earth is remarkably simple and straightforward, with math any trigonometry or geometry student could prove on their own. Eratosthenes did it a few thousand years ago with observations from a deep well and the shadow of a vertical rod a significant and measureable distance apart on the same day at the same time. These are simple and direct observations that anyone could make and repeat themselves. If Eratosthenes proof isn’t clear enough to them, nothing will be.
There was even a documentary in which self professed flat-earthers performed a variation of this experiment with some careful arrangement of a laser over a large lake. Unsurprisingly, they did measure the curvature of the earth (with much less precision than Eratosthenes), but they still couldn’t accept the results.
I think we both agree that if someone really doesn’t want to believe something, they’ll disregard things that conflict with their world view.
What I suspect we’ll disagree on is the extent to which everyone, very much including those of us who consider ourselves rational and sensible and at the science-trusting end of debates, form our beliefs about reality via an almost exclusively social and societal process of parental beliefs, teacher beliefs, peer beliefs, reading on and offline, and interaction with others. Not through experiment. Rarely through actual evidence. Mainly through believing other people who we think are telling the truth or better informed than us.
This is the context for my point about the ships over the horizon thing. It’s not even very convincing evidence to someone who already believes the conclusion and sees a lot of ships sail away.
Stop trolling me by trying to blur the line between scientific processes and social belief structures. Claiming that I don’t also apply logic and scientific thinking to analyze my own beliefs is also petty rage-bait, as if epistemology hasn’t also existed for a very long time.
Nope, not getting into with a long-winded blowhard confusing belief with objective observation and dead simple geometry. This is the same rhetoric used by the new fascists to shout down science. Being polite and pretending to be genuine doesn’t mean you’re not a troll.
Honestly, I’m not trying to troll you at all. We all come across people who believe crazy stuff, but if you genuinely want to persuade people, recognise where they’re coming from.
I have some important questions for you if you honestly believe that your belief system was arrived at by the empirical process:
Firstly, think about that rather bold claim and compare it with how many things you believe are true and how much rigorous empiricism you’ve engaged with yourself, personally. (You can’t count any times when you just trusted someone else who claimed it by appeal to authority, a well-known logical fallacy, because that would be both a social source of belief and literally illogical.)
Secondly, what counts as correct science and what counts as bogus science, and by what means is that decided? What process decides which information goes where? Who makes the decisions and why are they the ones who do?
Thirdly, how do you, personally find out about that stuff? How many journals do you read regularly? How many things written by the people who saw the evidence did you ever actually read? Who wrote the things you did and do read, and why do you believe them?
Claiming that I don’t also apply logic and scientific thinking to analyze my own beliefs is also petty rage-bait, as if epistemology hasn’t also existed for a very long time.
I’m honestly very skeptical of how much self reflection you put into how you know what you know given that my claim that pretty much everyone comes to their beliefs about the world through social interactions (rather than via experiment and direct evidence) is so new to you that it made you angry. Yes, epistemology has been around a long time, but you simply can’t have studied Philosophy of Science and be flabbergasted by what I’m suggesting. It’s another example of you trusting someone else and believing their conclusions without going into it all on detail and questioning it for yourself. Before you get cross about that too, please read the next paragraph.
No one can read it all. No one can repeat even a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of the experiments. You can’t be an expert in all branches of science and philosophy even if you tried. You can’t even begin to read it all. So you take it on trust. This isn’t bad. It’s sensible. It’s how you were (correctly) brought up - trust what your teachers tell you about science, because your parents, who you trusted implicitly before you even walked through the door of preschool, brought you up that way, because they believed those sources of belief before you did.
If the New York Times claimed that some professors at Cornell had found a tweak of relativity that removed the need for a theory of dark matter or dark energy because it matches the observed mass and expansion of the universe, and that the new theory also removed the inconsistency between relativity and quantum mechanics, you would likely believe it, especially if other papers ran with the same story and clever people you know told you more details having read a write up in the New Scientist magazine.
And yet by the same process, we knew that Pons and Fleishman had attained nuclear fusion in the lab. How did we subsequently know that it was bogus? By the same social process. Hundreds of millions of people changed their beliefs about the world twice. A handful of people did something empirical.
None of this is bad. But don’t assume that an appeal to examine evidence that you haven’t investigated yourself is going to convince a sceptic. They think they’re being more rigorous than you. They weren’t brought up to believe teachers or they weren’t brought up to trust “scientists”. You won’t convince them with the same appeals to scientific authority that work on you.