Earth Tipped on Its Side During the Age of Dinosaurs—and Not Just Once
Earth is definitely not flat, but it’s not perfectly spherical, either. Due to its constant rotation, our Earth is closer to a squashed elliptoid. What this also means is that occasionally, the geographic locations of Earth’s north and south poles will wander across the planet’s surface as the solid Earth slowly rotates relative to its spin axis, so it appears as if the Earth tips over on its side.
- ▪Earth is definitely not flat, but it’s not perfectly spherical, either.
- ▪Due to its constant rotation, our Earth is closer to a squashed elliptoid.
- ▪What this also means is that occasionally, the geographic locations of Earth’s north and south poles will wander across the planet’s surface as the solid Earth slowly rotates relative to its spin axis, so it appears as if the Earth tips ove
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Record
| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/earth-tipped-on-its-side-during-the-age-of-dinosaurs-and-not-just-once-2000820281 |
| Publication time | Thu, 01 Oct 2026 18:00:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-01T18:02:31.879Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-01T18:02:31.879Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 1RS3EVJ5KPkG · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Earth is definitely not flat, but it’s not perfectly spherical, either. Due to its constant rotation, our Earth is closer to a squashed elliptoid. What this also means is that occasionally, the geographic locations of Earth’s north and south poles will wander across the planet’s surface as the solid Earth slowly rotates relative to its spin axis, so it appears as if the Earth tips over on its side. And this phenomenon may have had a greater impact on our planet’s environment than scientists thought. This wandering phenomenon is called true polar wander.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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