5 May 2025
A collaboration between researchers Richard Arnold, April Boland, Zoë Brown and Rebecca Priestley and illustrator Hanna Breurkes. Edited by Jonathan Burgess.
It’s 2025, and in Aotearoa New Zealand there are a growing number of people who believe that the Earth is flat.
That’s an extraordinary statement, coming from a technologically advanced society living more than 2,000 years after Greek philosopher Eratosthenes showed the Earth was round. Most Greek scholars of his time believed that the Earth was a sphere – they observed that ships’ hulls disappeared over the horizon before their masts, and saw the curved shadow of the Earth on the Moon during lunar eclipses – but Eratosthenes proved the Earth’s surface was curved and determined its size. To do this, he made observations of the lengths of shadows cast by the sun at two points a known distance apart on the river Nile and used simple mathematics to demonstrate the circumference of the globe Earth.
Observation is the most fundamental scientific activity and all human beings are observers – it’s how we make sense of our lives and the world. So why, in a country where scientists have been found to be very highly trusted, do some people stop trusting the science derived from observations?
Some people distrust scientific consensus if it challenges their own observations. Our 2021 interview with the mayor of Westland showed he relied only on his own observations, rather than the advice of the international climate science community, in judging whether or not the climate was changing. “Every year I’ve taken a photo on the first of May off my veranda at home,” he said. “Every year, the snow arrives two or three days before, or on the day, and it hasn’t changed in 20 years. I don’t think I’ve had a year that it hasn’t been the same. Some years, you know, a bit more snow than others, but they’re observations that I make personally.” [1]
Our interviews with a small community of high country sheep farmers showed they know their land well, and are expert observers of the weather and interpreters of weather forecasts. They have to be, their livelihoods depend on it. But they mistakenly lump weather forecasts and climate projections together. Because national weather forecasts can’t accurately forecast the weather in their own valleys very far ahead, they distrusted projections for future climate, asking whether “anyone is qualified to work that out”?
Similarly, people we interviewed who believed in a flat Earth relied on their own local observations – for example, that large bodies of water look flat – and they rejected the geometrical proof of curvature by Eratosthenes, or photographs of the globe Earth taken from space, or even the nature of gravity. In one of a series of interviews with flat Earth believers, the interviewee said, “the water’s surface is flat, it will always find its level. So, to me, it makes a lot more sense that [the Earth is] a ‘flat’ thing, than a ball spinning 1600 kilometers around at the circumference, not throwing any water off anywhere, because there’s this other magical force all pulling it inwards at the same time [gravity].” [2]
We’re very good at observing our surroundings – we each know our own valley very well. The trouble is, we can’t easily see the next valley, or the wider landscape. But science sees more than we can see as individuals. Because it’s an activity carried out by thousands of people, science can see far beyond our individual valleys, it can draw conclusions based on far more data than one individual could ever collect, and can see changes over periods longer than single lifetimes.
Like the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant – in which the man who feels the trunk of the elephant believes he has encountered a giant snake, and the man who encounters a leg says the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk, and so on – we can find out so much more about the world if we work collectively than if we only rely on individual observations.
Some flat Earth believers told us that their disbelief in a round Earth was motivated by religion, but for others it came from a conviction that there is a widespread conspiracy to deceive and control people. They felt so alienated from science that they questioned some fundamental principles that we take for granted, such as gravity. For others a distrust of climate science is motivated by a dislike of policies that follow from accepting it; not everyone wants to swap their car for a bicycle or change to a plant-based diet. And some farmers don’t want to have to introduce what they see as costly changes to farming practices.
How did we get here? The method that Eratosthenes used for calculating the circumference of the Earth over two thousand years ago is still taught in schools, as is the chemistry of the greenhouse effect. Most of the farmers we spoke to had university qualifications – they knew about science. And we’ve interviewed flat Earth believers with strong instincts about the scientific method, about careful testing and experimenting.
So good science education and communication aren’t enough on their own.
When a stranger comes to your valley with news of the outside world, trust is not automatic – especially if they’re bringing bad news, or telling you to change your life. As scientists, we are often seen as strangers. So before we focus too much on communicating the science that we think is important, we need to start building trust with different communities living in different valleys. Because the challenges that we face are bigger than our own valleys.
[1] Westland mayor Bruce Smith, quoted in Rebecca Priestley, End Times (Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, 2023), p.140.
[2] April Boland, ‘Don’t push me, I’m close to the edge: Flat Earth adherence in Aotearoa New Zealand’, PhD thesis (in progress), School of Science in Society, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington.
Richard Arnold, April Boland, Zoë Brown and Rebecca Priestley are exploring how individuals and communities in Aotearoa New Zealand engage with, and trust (or mis-trust), science and scientists as part of the Science, statistics and the media project at Te Pūnaha Matatini.
Hanna Breurkes is a designer and illustrator who works with Toi Āria: Design for Public Good. She is based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can see more of her work at hannabreurkes.nz.