Is gravity the same over the surface of the Earth?
No -- in some places you will feel slightly heavier than others.
The
featured Earth map video shows in colors and
exaggerated highs and lows where the
gravitational field of
Earth
is relatively strong and weak.
A low spot, where you would feel slightly lighter,
can be seen just off the coast of
India, in blue,
while a relative high occurs in the mountains of
Chile in
South America.
The cause of these irregularities
does not always follow present surface features.
Scientists hypothesize that other important factors
lie in deep underground structures in
Earth's mantle and may be related to the
Earth's appearance in the
distant past.
The
featured map
was composed from data taken by
NASA's twin
GRACE
satellites that orbited the Earth from 2002 to 2017.
GRACE mapped Earth's gravity by carefully tracking
tiny changes in the distance between the two satellites.