There's Even Climate Change Evidence in Earth's Gravitational Field

Changes in Earth’s gravity field resulting from loss of ice from West Antarctica between November 2009 and June 2012 (mE = 10^–12 s^–2) (*see important note below). A combination of data from ESA’s GOCE mission and NASA’s Grace satellites shows the ‘vertical gravity gradient change’. Image source.

Even the Earth's gravitational pull seems determined to prove climate change denier ignorance wrong. Here's Amy Shira Teitel of DNews to explain how we've lost enough mass from ice sheets in Antarctica to cause changes strong enough for ESA and NASA gravity-sniffing satellites to detect.



I was wondering why she hadn't been on the Weekly Space Hangout in quite some time. :)

Here's an ESA video which summarizes how GOCE and Grace mission data combined forces to provide this discovery.



FYI, Grace is still going strong in an extended mission phase, whereas GOCE de-orbited and burned up in the atmosphere last year.



* This unit is used in geophysics to measure gravitational gradients, or the change in the acceleration of gravity with distance, horizontal or vertical. It is called a milli-Eötvös, abbreviated to mE, and by definition and simple mathematical deduction it amounts to one-thousandth of an Eötvös, a unit equaling 10^-9 per second squared (s^-2). The unit honors the Hungarian physicist Roland von Eötvös (1848-1919). Presumably, the ESA image above of West Antarctic and its land ice is missing a scale which would denote the mE amount represented by each color. You can see an example where such a scale was not mistakenly omitted here.