Ok, let's investigate:
The best way to get the shape of something is to measure it directly.
The Earth included.
Here we shall investigate at least one way of doing it.
People measured Earth countless times, and compared each other's results.
People measured parts of Earth for various purposes.
They measured distances, areas, altitudes, depths...
They needed to know travel times, fuel consumption, quantity of materials to build infrastructure (roads, power lines, phone lines, water pipes, ...)
Or they were just curious.
When you are curious you measure things yourself, you don't wait until someone else measures it for you.
Whatever was their reason, everyone knows very well the distances from his own town or village to all the next ones around.
You can not sell them some other distances if they were traveling those routes many times.
That way the distances between places are well known by local, and by less local population.
And those distances concatenate.
The information spread among people and can't be faked.
You can't publish wrong values without being overwhelmed by complaints from people who live there.
Also, tourists learn the distances when come to visit and rove around.
In this post we will use those distances to measure the Earth parameters without anyone's personal bias.
Every latitude has own parallel in the shape of a circle.
Each is divided by meridians into 360 degrees.
Within each degree of latitude we can select two places, find their distances and their longitude differences.
From those we can easily find the length of each degree along that parallel.
I will select some places, you can check them, or you can select your own.
Anyone can do it, and we can all compare our results.
Let's start with the Equator (0 degrees of latitude):
Libreville, Gabon - 9.376 degrees East
Kampala, Uganda - 32.593 degrees East
Longitude difference - 23.217 degrees
Distance - 1598.51 miles
Along the Equator each degree is 1598.51 / 23.217 = 68.85 miles long.
Now we go to 31 degree North:
Sirte, Libya - 16.554 E
Port Said, Egypt - 32.291 E
Longitude diff. - 15.737 deg
Distance - 929.65 mi
One degree - 59.07 mi / deg
More to the north, at 41 degree:
Barcelona, Spain - 2.183 E
Istanbul, Turkey - 29.011 E
Longitude diff. - 26.828 deg
Distance - 1390.17 mi
One degree - 51.82 mi / deg
Latitude 69 degrees North:
Harstad, Norway - 16.541 E
Tumanny, Russia - 35.668 E
Longitude diff. - 19.127 deg
Distance - 475.08 mi
One degree - 24.84 mi / deg
As we can see, the more to the north we go, the shorter gets each degree of longitude.
We can conclude that towards North our meridians converge.
Do they intersect at the North pole? For now we will leave that question open.
If we compare this with the most common Flat Earth map (Rowbotham's map), we will find that it fits.
But it also fits with the globe.
To find out which of the maps is closer to the reality, we would have to explore that reality more.
Let's go south.
Latitude is now 23 degrees south:
Windhoek, Namibia - 17.066 E
Vangaindrano, Madagascar - 47.591 E
Longitude diff. - 30.525 deg
Distance - 1939.38 mi
One degree - 63.53 mi / deg
More to the south, at latitude of 38 degrees:
Temuco, Chile - 72.594 W
Necochea, Argentina - 58.753 W
Longitude diff. - 13.841 deg
Distance - 746.6 mi
One degree - 53.94 mi / deg
Here we can see that the more to the south we go, the shorter each degree gets again.
So, meridians converge to the south just as they do to the north.
Do they intersect at the South pole? For now we will leave that question open as well.
All we can easily see is that this doesn't fit Rowbotham's map.
Here we can organize our measurements into neat little table like this:
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