Science: Painless Expansion

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The earth is round, all right—but not round like a bourgeois ball; it has a more complicated, more Russian shape. So a Soviet scientist announced recently. Since 1940, said Professor Alexander Alexandrovich Izotov, he and fellow Russian geodesists have painstakingly remeasured significant areas of the earth. Their measurements make expanding Russia bigger than ever.

The Moscow men determined that:

1) the earth's equator is not a perfect circle, as long supposed, but an ellipse;

2) the global area is about 125,000 square kilometers (47,500 square miles) larger than previously reckoned; 3) the Soviet Union has about 2,000 square miles more territory than maps show. (Added to the U.S.: 650 square miles.)

By U.S. measurements the earth's radius at the equator is 3,963⅓-miles. Too small, said Izotov; he calculated that in its thickest section the radius is about ½ mile more. The Izotov globe is flattened slightly not only at the poles, like previous globes, but at the equator. Thus the earth, like every ellipsoid, has three axes instead of two and must rotate with a slightly seasick motion.