NASA has released a new 3D model of the Earth’s gravitational field. “The geoid is an equipotential surface that can be thought of as the shape an ocean surface would take due to the Earth’s gravity field. The geoid height ranges from +85 m (Iceland) to −106 m (southern India). The geoid height visualized here comes from the gravity field model GOCO06s, a satellite-only global gravity field model computed by the GOCO (Gravity Observation Combination) project. It is based on over a billion observations acquired over 15 years from 19 satellites. These satellites include NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and ESA’s Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE).” At less than 200 metres difference, the difference is “not discernible” at a planetary scale, so they have a version where height is exaggerated by a factor of 10,000. [Wired]