gravity rainbow potato

[mattc]

This is intruguing yet bizarreL

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/72202/title/A_matter_of_gravity

As seen by a supersensitive gravity-detecting satellite, Earth isn’t a pale blue dot. It’s a colorful, irregular lump. Kind of like a tuber.

“Rotating potato — I don’t like this word,” said Roland Pail, a geoscientist at the Technical University of Munich. He and other researchers unveiled the new map of the Earth’s gravity field on March 31 at a scientific workshop in Munich.

Yet a rainbow potato it is. This image represents a sort of theoretical sea level known as the “geoid” — a surface where the ocean would rest if not pushed around by internal currents, tides and the weather.

[Pancho]

I'd imagine that gravity maps are handy for ICBMs. Presumably the military already have pretty good ones. And some software to account for all the water sloshing around from side to side.