"A sleek satellite orbiting Earth has confirmed that the planet is not the simple squashed sphere we often imagine it to be. It is, in fact, more like a lumpy potato.
Nearly a year's worth of gravitational measurements from the European Space Agency's Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) have yielded a colourful map portraying the geoid – the shape the Earth's surface would be if it was entirely covered by water and influenced by gravity alone.
The result is not a smooth sphere because mass is not distributed evenly within the Earth's mantle. Different parts of the globe exert a different gravitational pull on the ocean, meaning that sea level is lower than expected in some places – represented by blue patches – and higher than expected in others – the red and yellow areas.
In the visualisation, the vertical scale has been exaggerated by a factor of 7000, so the pits and crests are 7000 times shallower or taller, respectively, than depicted here."
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