one thing that hopefully most of us can agree on is the fact that the Earth is round.
Not everybody but those people are idiots what you might not know is that it isn’t technically a sphere though as it gets just a bit wider near the equator meaning
Its true shape is actually called an ellipsoid the shape change isn’t all that dramatic though certainly not something.
You’d notice on a photograph and in the same way that the Earth’s shape is relatively uniform so is its distribution of mass
Yes there are mountains Canyons valleys you name it and from our perspective the surface might look rather bumpy
But because of the sheer size of the planet is actually overall pretty smooth NE degrass Tyson once claims that relative to its size it was even smoother than a cubal.
But this doesn’t tell the full story it may look visually smooth.But the force of gravity is exerted at slightly different strengths
around the globe based on slightly varying densities of materials underneath our feet a map of these gravitational highs and lows is known as a global geoid.
And we’re constantly refining our giid models with new and improved data the weirdest gravitational anomaly can be found in
the Indian Ocean first discovered in 1948 by a Dutch geophysicist.
There is a significant low point on the geoy with a large portion of the ocean actually resting about a 100 M below the average sea level long dubs a gravity hole this peculiar spot has been known about for years.
But its C has eluded scientists until now in the summer of 2023 researchers at the Indian Institute of science published their study investigating this strange location using
Advanced Computer simulated models of the geological history going back about 140 million years
The team ran 19 simulations each varying by the tectonic activity Composites of the crust behavior of the magma in the mantle and much more
six of these simulations resulted in the gravitational anomaly seen today and what all six of these had in common was
the creation of large magma plumes underneath the region created by The Disappearance of an ancient ocean
Which was removed from the map when the Indian subcontinent smashed into Asia they posit that as the oceanic plate was pushed down into the mantle
it affected the composition and density of the magma creating these plumes the researchers do make sure to point out.
Though that we’ve yet to find evidence for these plumes outside of the computer simulation as more work is needed in the area
and they’re open to the idea that some other currently unknown force is at hand waiting to be discovered.
But it does sound very promising and if confirmed would mean we finally solved a little mystery of our planet’s
