This demo distorts a flat plane onto the surface of a globe, depending on lat/long parameters passed to the object's material. It also uses Render-to-texture maps for displacement, with erode and dilate morphological operations.
http://meetar.github.io/globe-terrain/
Associated post:
http://fjord.style/going-into-detail
More detailed demos of the underlying technique are here:
https://github.com/meetar/heightmap-demos
As well as more detail about the theory;