Earth's circumference mile in the seventeenth century and the metre in the eighteenth. Earth's polar circumference is almost exactly 40,000 km because the metre was originally calibrated on this measurement (1/10-millionth of the distance between the poles and the equator), which is almost exactly 21,600 nautical miles (being defined as one minute of a degree – i.e. 360 multiplied by 60). It has been described as "the single most important measurement" of the Earth, assuming the Earth to be a sphere (the Earth is an technically an ellipsoid, albeit with just 0.3% flattening). Earth's circumference lines are the foundation of the coordinate
Comparison of the imperial and US customary measurement systems with State Plane Coordinate Systems. (The choice of unit for surveying purposes is based on the unit used when the overall framework or geodetic datum for the region was established, so that - for example - much of the former British empire still uses the Clarke foot for surveying.) The US survey foot is defined so that 1 metre is exactly 39.37 inches, making the international foot of 0.3048 metres exactly two parts per million shorter. This is a difference of just over 3.2 mm or a little over one eighth of an inch per mile. The main units of