Globe | EPFL Graph Search

Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?

Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.

A globe is a spherical model of Earth, of some other celestial body, or of the celestial sphere. Globes serve purposes similar to maps, but unlike maps, they do not distort the surface that they portray except to scale it down. A model globe of Earth is called a terrestrial globe. A model globe of the celestial sphere is called a celestial globe. A globe shows details of its subject. A terrestrial globe shows landmasses and water bodies. It might show nations and major cities and the network of latitude and longitude lines. Some have raised relief to show mountains and other large landforms. A celestial globe shows notable stars, and may also show positions of other prominent astronomical objects. Typically, it will also divide the celestial sphere into constellations. The word globe comes from the Latin word globus, meaning "sphere". Globes have a long history. The first known mention of a globe is from Strabo, describing the Globe of Crates from about 150 BC. The oldest surviving terrestrial globe is the Erdapfel, made by Martin Behaim in 1492. The oldest surviving celestial globe sits atop the Farnese Atlas, carved in the 2nd century Roman Empire. Flat maps are created using a map projection that inevitably introduces an increasing amount of distortion the larger the area that the map shows. A globe is the only representation of the Earth that does not distort either the shape or the size of large features – land masses, bodies of water, etc. The Earth's circumference is quite close to 40 million metres. Many globes are made with a circumference of one metre, so they are models of the Earth at a scale of 1:40 million. In imperial units, many globes are made with a diameter of one foot (about 30 cm), yielding a circumference of 3.14 feet (about 96 cm) and a scale of 1:42 million. Globes are also made in many other sizes. Some globes have surface texture showing topography or bathymetry. In these, elevations and depressions are purposely exaggerated, as they otherwise would be hardly visible.

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (3)

Related units (1)

Related concepts (13)

Related lectures (1)

Indian astronomy

Indian astronomy refers to astronomy practiced in Indian subcontinent. It has a long history stretching from pre-historic to modern times. Some of the earliest roots of Indian astronomy can be dated to the period of Indus Valley civilisation or earlier. Astronomy later developed as a discipline of Vedanga, or one of the "auxiliary disciplines" associated with the study of the Vedas dating 1500 BCE or older. The oldest known text is the Vedanga Jyotisha, dated to 1400–1200 BCE (with the extant form possibly from 700 to 600 BCE).

Scale (map)

The scale of a map is the ratio of a distance on the map to the corresponding distance on the ground. This simple concept is complicated by the curvature of the Earth's surface, which forces scale to vary across a map. Because of this variation, the concept of scale becomes meaningful in two distinct ways. The first way is the ratio of the size of the generating globe to the size of the Earth. The generating globe is a conceptual model to which the Earth is shrunk and from which the map is projected.

New World

The term New World is often used to describe the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere, including the Americas. The term gained prominence in the early 16th century during Europe's Age of Discovery, shortly after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci concluded that America, now often called the Americas, represented a new continent and subsequently published his findings in Mundus Novus, a Latin language pamphlet.

Geodesic Active Fields

Dominique Zosso

Image registration is the concept of mapping homologous points in a pair of images. In other words, one is looking for an underlying deformation field that matches one image to a target image. The spectrum of applications of image registration is extremely ...

EPFL2011

Beltrami-Flow to Generate a Scale-Space of Cortical Feature Maps on the Sphere.

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Dominique Zosso

In this paper we define a scale-space for cortical mean curvature maps on the sphere, that offers a hierarchical representation of the cortical structures, useful in multi-scale algorithms. A spherical feature map is obtained through inflation of the corti ...

2009

A Scale-Space of Cortical Feature Maps

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Dominique Zosso

In this paper we define a scale-space for cortical mean curvature maps on the sphere, that offers a hierarchical representation of the brain cortical structures, useful in multi-scale registration and analysis algorithms. A spherical feature map is obtaine ...

2009

Covers observation scales, coordinate systems, geoid, and projection systems in GIS.