Why do some places on Earth have higher gravity than others? Sometimes the reason is unknown. To help better understand the Earth's surface, sensitive measurements by the orbiting satellites GRACE and CHAMP were used to create a map of Earth's gravitational field. Since a center for studying these data is in Potsdam, Germany, and since
Maybe my eyes are gliding over it, but does anyone know what the actual difference is? They’ve got relative “+80” to “-80”, but no indication of what those units are. Would I be 1 kg lighter between the highest and lowest spot or .0001 grams lighter?
Based on Wikipedia I think the unit is milligals, where a gal is 1 centimeter per second squared.
That is a bit of an odd unit where g is ~980,000 milligals.
So these changes are extremely small.
So then the total variation is all within about 0.02% of gravities normal value
The article says it’s “slightly different”, I imagine of a few grams, cuz a difference of 1kg between zones would be exaggerated.