The reason for this is that Earth bulges outward at the Equator because of the planet's rotation and its tendency to stay in a straight line while moving. This creates a gravitational field that is uneven, with more pull on the poles than in the middle. Because of this bulge, a person standing at the Equator is really further from the majority of Earth's mass than a person standing at either of the poles. But don't get your hopes up too much - the weight difference is a mere 0.5%! That's less than a pound for anyone weighing less than 200 pounds.
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Geophysicists found that global positioning stations near the quake’s epicenter moved as far as 13 feet eastward! This does not mean that the entire country shifted, but that the nation has actually grown wider. NASA scientists have also found that the earthquake may have shorted the length of the day by a couple of milliseconds and shifted the Earth’s axis!
In fact, nearly no educated person has held this belief since the time of the ancient Greeks! The idea of a spherical Earth first appeared around the 6th century B.C. with the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and continued to permeate Greek and Roman culture, even after the advent of Christianity. The thought that Columbus held such a fallacy did not emerge until the 1830’s, when a Frenchman named Antoine-Jean Letronne and the well-known American author Washington Irving separately composed works of historical fiction which misrepresented Columbus. This myth eventually made its way into schoolbooks and is still often taught to this day! The lie is believed to have been promoted as a way of heightening the religion/science debate and giving ammunition to Darwinism over creationism.
