NASA image shows Earth’s lumpiness — exaggerated 10,000 times

NASA image shows Earth’s lumpiness — exaggerated 10,000 times View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed NASA image shows Earth’s lumpiness — exaggerated 10,000 times The Earth is neither flat nor round. Actually, it's somewhere between a potato and a billiard ball. _The outline of America’s Pacific coast is faintly visible on this imageo of the geoid. The bulge on top is caused by heavier material in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge near Iceland. ( ce ExplorationScienceEarth ScienceGeology No, the Earth is not flat.

But it’s not exactly _round_ either. Nor is it — let us stop you right there, smartypants — an oblate spheroid. An oblate spheroid is a geometrically smooth model of our planet that, due to its rotation, bulges at the equator and flattens at the poles.

While it is close enough to be used by GPS systems, for instance, it’s not _quite_ right: It doesn’t account for the lumpiness of our actual Earth. The technical term for the model that _does_ is a geoid. This model shows what the ocean surface would look like if the entire planet were covered by water and sculpted only by gravity, leaving the surface slightly lumpy.

What does that look like? This visualization by NASA exaggerates the Earth’s surface dents and bumps by a factor of 10,000, making our cosmic home look like a slightly deflated beach ball, or a somewhat lumpy potato. Don’t get us wrong: This is not a shocking new discovery.

Scientists have known for a long time about our planet’s inner potato. But this NASA image, released in July by its Scientific Visualization Studio at Goddard Space Flight Center, puts a fresh coat of paint on it. NASA’s new model draws on the GOCO06s gravity field, a dataset built from more than a billion measurements collected over 15 years by 19 satellites, including NASA’s own GRACE mission and the European Space Agency’s GOCE — a sleek, finned spacecraft dubbed “the Ferrari of space.” Get the fall print issue, shipping in October, to members only.

The actual numbers may be less impressive than Planet Spud here suggests, but are still surprising: The geoid has a high point of 85 meters (279 feet) above average sea level, and a low of 106 meters (348 feet) below, south of India. To visualize that: The Brooklyn Bridge’s suspension towers rise about 85 meters out of the water; and if you stand the Hollywood Sign on its side, that’s a height (or a depth) of 106 meters. So the total spread of the geoid’s lumpiness is 191 meters (627 feet), wide enough to fit in the Gateway Arch in St.