A geometry created in Earth Engine is either geodesic (i.e. edges are the shortest path
on the surface of a sphere) or planar (i.e. edges are the shortest path in a 2-D Cartesian
plane). No one planar coordinate system is suitable for global collections of features,
so Earth Engine's geometry constructors build geodesic geometries by default. To make a
planar geometry, constructors have a geodesic
parameter that can be set
to false:
Code Editor (JavaScript)
var planarPolygon = ee.Geometry(polygon, null, false);
Figure 1 shows the difference between the default geodesic polygon and the result of converting the polygon to a planar representation.
![geodesic planar polygon](https://developers-dot-devsite-v2-prod.appspot.com/static/earth-engine/images/Geometry_geodesic_vs_planar_annotated.png?authuser=0000)
You can convert between geodesic and planar geometries using the ee.Geometry
constructor.