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> A vast expanse of the Indian Ocean is a staggering 100 meters lower than the global average sea level because of a major dip in Earth’s gravity. who would wr
by 2-718-281-828 3y ago
> A vast expanse of the Indian Ocean is a staggering 100 meters lower than the global average sea level because of a major dip in Earth’s gravity.
who would write such a gibberish in a scientific magazine?
- Etrnl_President 3y agoScientific American mostly ceased being scientific in the latter 90's, and should be more correctly named Political American.
- 2-718-281-828 3y agoi wouldn't mind this gibberish if the article would at least make clear afterwards what this is supposed to mean. but i can't find any explanation of the gravitational dynamics at play or even a description how exactly this is measured. 100m relative to what? i mean isn't sea level always 0m by definition? even on that "dip" sea level is 0m. so there is some assumed distance between sea surface and something else. an ideal circumference around the equator with the same volume (or technically area) of air under it as water over it? like an x-axis going through a sinus curve? one might argue that sth like that shouldn't show up on the hn front page. but maybe the meta message and discussion of the quality of sa journalism is worth the +31 points.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago> 100m relative to what? You quoted it yourself: "the sea level of the Indian Ocean over the hole is a whopping 106 meters lower than the global average" We already know that sea level isn't a uniform height. If it were tides wouldn't be a thing. The various ocean's waters are going to be at different levels. > i mean isn't sea level always 0m by definition? You could make the same argument for ground level but we know that's not uniform.
- misnome 3y ago... Finally, proof of flat-earth! Everywhere on land is 0cm above the land-level! Checkmate, scientists.
- Gravityloss 3y agothe literalist faction of the flat earth movement.
- Rapzid 3y agoThe Earth has a center of Gravity and they are using satellites to measure it so...
- emmelaich 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System
- ben_w 3y agoA large language model trained by… Or even a small model. AI generated news was a thing well before anyone heard of transformer models. Wikipedia gives this, from 2012, as the citation for the claim "2006, Thomson Reuters announced their switch to automation to generate financial news stories on its online news platform": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2012.667268 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2012.66...
- fergie 3y agoI don't get it- why is this gibberish? (other than perhaps being counter-intuitive- you would expect low gravity to cause high sea level)
- crystaln 3y agoIt makes sense to me. I’m assuming in this context sea level is distance from the center of the earth.
- defrost 3y agoDistance from ellipsoid surface (eg WGS84 (or closely related model) ) - the earth isn't spherical, the poles are ~ 20km closer to the earth's centre than the mean equatorial radius.
- waynecochran 3y agoYeah i read that and I immediately thought BS. The most the tide varies on earth is less 15 meters.
- blincoln 3y agoIt's in relation to a theoretical ellipsoid shape. "The geoid can be as low as 106 meters (350 feet) below the ellipsoid or as high as 85 meters (280 feet) above."[1] [1] https://www2.csr.utexas.edu/grace/gravity/gravity_definition.html https://www2.csr.utexas.edu/grace/gravity/gravity_definition...
- waynecochran 3y agoYes. The polar and equatorial diameter of the the earth differ by over 20 miles, but along a latitude line the earth is quite circular.
- Linosaurus 3y ago> quite circular In this case it’s 106m away from a perfect circle. Almost nothing compared to 20km, but a real thing.
- ivan_gammel 3y agoIt is not gibberish if you studied physics at school. Water surface remains on the same level of potential energy of gravitational field, othewise it won’t be the state with minimum energy. This means that if the field has complex form, the water surface won’t be ellipsoid. If the pull is stronger, you can expect a bulge, if the pull is weaker, there will be a hole and the depth of that hole can be bigger than the tidal amplitude, because why not. EDIT: also, in case of Indian Ocean, it is not a hole, just slightly different curvature.