Posted on 11/06/2007 8:48:14 AM PST by SunkenCiv
The red spots represent places where the Earth's gravity is unusually strong. The blue ones are where it's weak. Not that the force of gravity itself varies. Rather, it's an indication that the Earth's mass distribution isn't quite uniform. Mountain-building in South America and the Himalayas produces dense, red zones; elsewhere, tectonic movements produce thin, blue, ones... Some changes are geological. For example, much of Canada, centred around Hudson Bay, is undergoing "postglacial rebound" as the continental crust slowly rises after being depressed, thousands of years ago, by the weight of Ice Age glaciers. Other changes are related to redistributions of water. Melting ice sheets, heavy rains, changes in soil moisture: all of these shift around enough water to make discernable changes in the Earth's gravitational field. Some of these are signs of global warming. Others provide early warning of floods, crop failures, and aquifer depletion in remote corners of the globe. "Water has weight," says project scientist Michael Watkins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California. "It has gravitational attraction, and GRACE can detect it."
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmosmagazine.com ...
Warts and all: The Earth as seen by the GRACE satellites. The red spots represent places where the Earth's gravity is unusually strong. The blue ones are where it's weak. Image: NASA/University of Texas Center for Space ResearchNews flash -- water has weight. I wonder what weighs more, rock or water?
This is true...but the differences in gravity across various areas amounts to about a 1 ounce difference in the weight of a 150 pound person. It’s not as if it’s anything even remotely noticable.
What weighs more...a pound of water, a pound of feathers, or a pound of rocks??
Astronomy Picture Of The Day : A Gravity Map of Earth
NASA | 11.13.01 | Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (USRA)
Posted on 11/13/2001 8:27:19 AM EST by callisto
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/569855/posts
Einstein’s Warped View of Space Confirmed
Space.Com via Yahoo | Oct 20 2004 | Robert Roy Britt
Posted on 10/20/2004 11:02:29 PM EDT by RightWingAtheist
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1251741/posts
[snip] Earth’s spin warps space around the planet, according to a new study that confirms a key prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. After 11 years of watching the movements of two Earth-orbiting satellites, researchers found each is dragged by about 6 feet (2 meters) every year because the very fabric of space is twisted by our whirling world... The effect is called frame dragging. It is a modification to the simpler aspects of gravity set out by Newton. Working from Einstein’s relativity theory, Austrian physicists Joseph Lense and Hans Thirring predicted frame dragging in 1918. (It is also known as the Lense-Thirring effect.)...Any object with mass warps the space-time around it, in much the same way as a heavy object deforms a stretched elastic sheet, explained study leader Ignazio Ciufolini of the Universita di Lecce in Italy. If the object spins, another distortion is introduced... If the space around Earth is being frame-dragged, then satellites ought to be caught up in the deformation... Ciufolini’s team analyzed millions of laser signals bounced off two satellites, called LAGEOS and LAGEOS 2. Both are highly reflective spheres not designed to do any work of their own. They look like 2-foot-diameter (0.6m) golf balls and contain no batteries or electronics. The researchers say their result is 99 percent of the predicted drag, with an error of up to 10 percent. [end]
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So...I’ll have a much better chance of dunking in a pickup basketball game on a freighter in the Indian Ocean? ;)
Most rock (not counting pumice) is denser than water. Hence, it does not float.
All three of those items weigh more than a pound of gold.
It's true!
Well, let's throw a rock into a pool of water, then throw water in a pool of rock...
I forget - Do witches float or sink when you throw them in water?
It's true!
Yes, I know...avoirdupois units vs. troy units.
I may have been a political science major in college who hated physics, but I still know a thing or two about it.
Does this say that the world is obese?
I’m so confused now
The Great Global Obesity Epidemic?
I’ll watch NBC tonight and really find out/s
You post the coolest stuff.
Wow, thanks! I think Blam is way out in the lead on that.
The Great Capitalist Global Tobacco Obesity Warming Oil Epidemic...
witches float and, ergo, the problem. if you drown you are not a witch. if you float you are torched.
so guess from this picture there are no gravity red spots in the western hemisphere.
My wife is from one of the red areas (the southern Philippines). I wonder how this affected her?
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