Let’s start off with a little geography. What is a meter? It is the distance from one of the poles to the equator divided by ten million. Therefore, the earth’s circumference is 40 million meters or 40,000 kilometers (x 5/8 = 25,000 miles). (A little trivia here: since a meter is a fraction of the earth’s circumference, there is a direct relationship between a nautical mile, which equals one minute of latitude, and a kilometer. One kilometer = 0.54 nautical miles. But I digress…)