As xkcd points out, this kinda makes a mockery of the pole vault. Certainly at the olympic level anyway.

http://xkcd.com/852/

Of the world record, at least. The actual olympic competitions are still valid.

This also proves that it's not McDonalds fault.

Looks like there is a patch of substantially reduced gravity near Sri Lanka. I wonder if India has already taken this into account for the launch pads at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.

So, does that mean i live "longer" if I stay in a city that has less gravity? With the right kind of advertising, it looks like India's real estate could go through the roof.

Also see GRACE (launched in 2002), which measures the time variation in Earth's gravity field, albeit with a much lower spatial resolution than GOCE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Recovery_and_Climate_Ex...

And GRAIL, to be launched September of this year, which will do the same thing for the interior of the Moon:

http://moon.mit.edu/

I'm curious as to why stronger gravity areas are portrayed by outward growth (aka growth in the opposite direction of gravity) and not inward to portray compression. Is this a common representation or might it be to improve the potato-effect?

I believe the elevation of each point relative to the center represents the distance that one would have to be from earth's centroid to experience the same gravitational acceleration (relative to some baseline, presumably an average).

So, if you're in a stronger-than-average gravity spot, you move away from the centre until you are experiencing the same gravitational force.

Personally, I like the explanation they gave in the article: "It is the shape the oceans would adopt if there were no winds, no currents and no tides ... magnified nearly 10,000 times".

That makes sense. Thanks!

It would be nice if the article gave analogies to the varying effects of gravity depending on your location in the world (e.g. jumping up and down on the north pole would be like jumping up and down in North America with a 5 pound brick attached to your shoes.)

At least for humans, it would be fascinating to learn if evolutionary discrepancies among different people across the world can be attributed to differing gravitational effects.

They emphased the data with a factor of 10.000 to get the differences through, so I'd guesstimate the weight in the ballpark of a gram (0,0022 pound nugget).

As for what it's good for, the article has a good example: "Now, with Goce, we can unify this so that we don't get the sort of surprises we had when they built the Channel Tunnel and discovered a half-metre offset between the UK and France."

Wow so I could lose some weight just by traveling to... hmm, any desirable locations to visit?

but you'll live less (faster) as less gravity speeds the time up