Climate Change Is Causing Dips in the Earth's Gravity

There are many dumb ways to deny climate change: noting the recent (and temporary) slowdown in heating, pointing to a snowy winter in your hometown, crying that it's part of the natural climate cycle. But it's pretty hard to look the other way on global warming when it's happening on such a massive scale that it's being felt in the earth's dang gravity field.

Satellites can image the planet in a slew of interesting ways, and one of these is gravitational. For instance, here's a 2011 model from the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer, which is operated by the European Space Agency. "The colours in the image represent deviations in height (–100 m to +100 m) from an ideal geoid," writes the ESA. "The blue shades represent low values and the reds/yellows represent high values":