Earth’s gravity is lumpy. “The gravity in East Antarctica is measurably weaker than anywhere else on the planet.”
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Comments 2
The geodetic systems that we use, like WGS84, incorporate a gravitational model. Earth’s variation in gravity has to be accounted for accurate GPS measurements.
Earth Gravitational Model
Not only is it lumpy, but it varies over time. Once upon a time, people used very good pendulum clocks as time references. Since they've been superseded other people have got interested in just how good they were, and have measured their rate against atomic time. Things like the Moon are easily visible as periodic variations in rate, but it turns out that the ultimate limit may be because gravity varies at a given location, because of things like the water table changing.
In other words, these clocks were pretty close to being as accurate as a pendulum clock could, in theory, be. I think that's just amazing.
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