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Science

The Earth is Getting Fatter 43

Posted by michael from the oblate-spheroid dept.
murk1e writes "The BBC News service has an article which reveals that the Earth is getting fatter. It is well known that the Earth is slightly wider at the equator than at the poles, it is less well known that for years, the Earth has been becoming more spherical. Now it appears that the trend has reversed, and the Earth is getting more obese (in the sense of shape change rather than changing mass). Perhaps the Earth should sue?"
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The Earth is Getting Fatter More

The Earth is Getting Fatter

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  • It might be responsibile for the global warming. I mean since the earth is getting bigger; it means it's getting closer to the sun in a way; so perhaps that's why the Earth is warming up.

    • We are at the farthest distance from the sun now? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Feeling any cooler?
    • It might be responsibile for the global warming. I mean since the earth is getting bigger; it means it's getting closer to the sun in a way; so perhaps that's why the Earth is warming up.

      MILLIMETERS ? I hope you aren't seriously considering that possibility. Our orbit with the sun varies annually by thousands of miles, as it's not a perfect circle. Millimeters won't matter much.

      • Reminds me of a tour guide in West Virginia who advised us to wear extra sunscreen because we'd be "awfully close to the sun" at the top of the ski slope.

        I'd make up some quip about that level of intelligence being par for WV, but then again, I was the one visiting a ski slope during the summer.

  • An interesting "violation" of the 2nd law of thermodynamics....since the only other natural phenomenon to have done this, afaik, is life itself, one can only assume that this is an effect of life on Earth, barring some other wierd cause.

    • "An interesting "violation" of the 2nd law of thermodynamics....since the only other natural phenomenon to have done this, afaik, is life itself, one can only assume that this is an effect of life on Earth, barring some other wierd cause."

      so, you think that only life can affect what happens to earth? So, there must be life on the moon Io, if it has activity? The Great Red Spot must be created by life, since it's a change? I'm sorry, but blaming Mankind and for any change this planet goes through is just ignorant. Are you from Kentucky or West Virgina by any chance?

      • Close- Illinois. I didn't mean to be "blaming" anyone for anything...I suppose my wording is such, though...Anyway, what I meant by "violation" is that life started relatively simple and became incredibly complex. This is prob. an idea that someone has fit into existing theories adequately, though?
    • Momentum's conserved, mass is conserved, energy is conserved -- nothing unusual is happening here. It's just the sloshing of the matter in an object. There's no violation of physics here.

      Life isn't a violation of the second law, either. Put energy into a system, and you can reduce entropy locally. The only things that violate the second law are perpetual motion machines. (Small statistical glitches, like those reported last week, aren't violations either, as the second law is statistical.)

      • But how is that energy being "put into" the said system?

        (I'm no physicist, and will freely admit to having a less-than-perfect understanding of all this, so I question as much to learn as anything.)

        I guess what I'm getting at is that, for life to have started simply and become complex, something would have had to "put energy into" life. But how can nature put energy into life when life is already, perhaps, of a higher energy state than is the rest of nature?

        • Re:This is in no way a violation of the second law (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          The Earth is not a closed system, we receive most of our energy from the Sun, and a lot of energy is radiated off of our planet, as well.

          Variations of entropy locally on Earth are not significant by comparison.

        • *drum roll*

          The sun.

          But how can nature put energy into life when life is already, perhaps, of a higher energy state than is the rest of nature?

          You shouldn't bandy about terms like "energy state" -- they have precise meanings. Anyhow, "nature" isn't giving our planet energy; the sun is. It is very hot and bright, and spits out lots of photons, some of which hit the Earth. Organisms, directly or indirectly, use that energy to do work and to reduce entropy locally. No violation of physical laws.

          And it's no problem to have order arise out of chaos so long as there's energy available to use... and even if there isn't, order can arise spontaneously in small systems out of disorder, thanks to the statistical nature of the second law.

  • it is less well known that for years, the Earth has been becoming more spherical. Now it appears that the trend has reversed, and the Earth is getting more obese

    ... that yo-yo dieting just doesn't work. Eat less and exercise.

  • Hmmm, a sphere that is wider at the center (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "It is well known that the Earth is slightly wider at the equator than at the poles"

    Now isn't that strange. A sphere that has a smaller radius at the top than the center.

    Maybe we can make an equation for that....Hmmm

    COS X

  • This was also covered in the Philadelphia Inquirer [philly.com]. In the article, they go into a little more detail about measuring the Earth's diameter. Sounds like they are taking advantage of some sort of Doppler shift:

    That doesn't change much - just a few millimeters - from year to year. Tiny as that sounds, satellite tracking allows scientists to make extremely precise measurements of the planet's shape.

    Changes in the shape influence the strength of the Earth's gravitational pull from place to place, said Benjamin Chao of NASA-Goddard. Those gravitational changes in turn influence the positions of satellites.

    And that's something they can measure to within centimeters. "We shoot laser beams to the satellites," he said. The time it takes for the laser light to bounce off reflective surfaces and back to the ground tells them precisely how far their satellites are, said Chao, who collaborated in the findings. He and Cox put the satellite positions into a computer, he said. That's how they got their surprise finding.

    • That doesn't sound like Doppler-based measurement. It's simple laser ranging, though you've got to take the Doppler effect into account because of the relative motion of the Earth and the satellite.

  • Probably just a normal oscillation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Friday August 02, 2002 @10:43AM (#3998623) Journal
    This is probably just a normal oscillation the Earth undergoes, driven by the impetus of the various gravitational influences it experiences over time. If we waited around long enough, it would probably start going back.

    In fact, just thinking about it, it's virtually inconceivable that it wouldn't oscillate this way. Consider the Earth as a giant drop of water cruising through space. (Note that on a plantary scale, everything is liquid, which is why the surface is smooth. If the Earth were the size of a cue ball, it would be the smoothest cue ball ever made. This is also why blowing up a planet and seeing huge chunks fly away is stupid; it's basically a liquid, it should 'blow up' like one.) Of course it oscillates, what with Saturn and Jupiter and innumerable other influences constantly 'twanging' it.

    The only real question is what the period is.

    Note that it is utterly inconceivable that humanity has had any significant effect on this process simply by moving mass around. Do a compution on the total mass we've ever moved around, at all. Be generous; go ahead and assume 2002-level industrial output for 10,000 years of human history, which will be an overestimate by about a factor of 5,000. Now divide by the mass of the Earth. Then remember to use your brain when thinking about human effects in the future. (Some things we can and do affect negatively. There are other things we could literally not hope to effect in a million years. Moving a significant fraction of the planet is one of those. Recall the planet is a huge sphere of which "the surface" is itself only a tiny, tiny fraction...)
  • They made a typo. The earth is getting FLATTER. http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatea rthsociety.htm
  • to repeat... the following is a link to the original NASA press release. It also includes two rather pointless images that highlight the direction of the "bulge" pre-1997 and post-1997.
    • Satellites Reveal a Mystery of Large Change in Earth's Gravity [nasa.gov]
      Satellite data since 1998 indicates the bulge in the Earth's gravity field at the equator is growing, and scientists think that the ocean may hold the answer to the mystery of how the changes in the trend of Earth's gravity are occurring.
    if you like the globe in the images there's a better one on the same web site called the Blue Marble [nasa.gov]

    and don't forget to check out the Natural Hazards [nasa.gov]

  • I think the crappy satelites are just slowly falling to the earth...it would make scense because the gravitational field is increasing [slashdot.org].
  • as usual the rest of the world is becoming americanized

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