Abstract
In his contribution, Professor MacDonald referred briefly to the non-hydrostatic component of the Earth’s flattening, along with other non-hydrostatic terms in the gravity field. Professor Runcorn did not mention this component at all. Both employed maps of the geoid which referred to an ellipsoid with a flattening of 1/298'3—the actual flattening— and which therefore showed no effects of the second harmonic. I should like to discuss this particular harmonic in some detail, because it is the bestestablished and the largest deviation from fluid equilibrium. Its most conspicuous effect is shown in figure 1. Here the solid line is the trace of a great circle on a Mercator map.
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Schedule a callMore From: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences
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