• Question: is there a stronger/weaker gravitational pull in some places on earth

    Asked by da buxton watter TGS to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      @da buxton watter TGS actually this is a very clever question. If you stand next to a large mountain, because gravity is all to do with how massive something is, the gravitational attraction of the earth will be counter-acted by the gravitational attraction of the mountain pulling upwards. So the actual gravity will be slightly less than if the mountain wasn’t there! But not by very much though.

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Yes, the gravitational pull does change from place to place on Earth. There was actually a satellite called the ‘Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer’ (or GOCE for short) that mapped out those variations in gravity across Earth’s surface.

      It’s all very tiny changes, though, not something you’d notice yourself but something that computers and sensitive experiments can detect, and it tells us something about what the planet is made of.

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      There is a very mild change in gravitational pull based on the density of the rock beneath your feet – you can look up the maps that NASA has made of the gravitational field strength (one such is here: ) – red areas are stronger than you’d expect, and blue are weaker than you’d expect. It’s an interesting map!

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