Canada’s area of low gravity
p2pnet.net OT news:- There’s an area in northern Canada where locals weigh less than anywhere else in the world. And it’s all to do with gravity. Or, rather, the lack of it.
About 20,000 years ago, much of North America was buried under the Laurentide Ice Sheet, a giant glacier.
“Its crushing weight caused some of the rock beneath to compress and sink, and in the process displace the underlying semifluid mantle,” says Science Magazine.
It goes on: This effect was most severe in two regions of northern Canada flanking Hudson Bay, where the ice formed two huge domes. Theorists had predicted that Earth’s gravity retained the echoes of the glacial domes as a pair of dimples where the force is reduced.”
Geophysicists from the University of Toronto and Harvard analyzed data from NASA’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, which measure the Earth’s gravitational field, paying special attention to the area in Canada where gravity is unusually low.
Adds Science Magazine:
The spacecraft use ultraprecise clocks to track irregularities in their orbits caused by anomalies in Earth’s gravitational pull. In tomorrow’s Science, a team led by geophysicist Mark Tamisiea of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, confirms that gravity is slightly weaker–about 1/25,000 less than normal–in the two regions. The tug of gravity is increasing slightly as the crust slowly rises and the mantle refills the resulting cavity underneath. Based on observations from the GRACE satellites over four years ending in 2006, Tamisiea says it will take up to 300,000 years for the regions’ gravity to return to normal.
Also See:
Science Magazine – Want to Feel Slimmer? Come to Canada, May 10, 2007
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