The shape of the land of fat in Ecuador Most of the land in Ecuador. The fact was revealed from studies of data gathered by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite (GRACE) belonging to NASA and the German Space Agency. Mentioned, the increased accumulation in Ecuador is caused by the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.
According to Steve Nerem, scientists at the University of Colorado, United States, up to 22 thousand years, the ice several kilometers covered most of Earth's northern hemisphere. Due to pressure from the weight of ice on land has been reduced due to the merger, the ground beneath him was bouncing and causing the Earth to be more oval. "Like a sponge, and it takes a long time that the Earth back to the original form," says Nerem.
For more information, from the beginning, the Earth is not perfectly round. Because of the speed of rotation, the water in the Earth's surface more clustered in the equatorial region than at the poles.
Scientists themselves to observe the emergence of "fat reduction" in the circumference of Ecuador. But then there is a change. Around the 1990's, we know that the trend has reversed and Earth re-add "fat in waist circumference," like a ball that is squeezed from above and below it. But they do not have the tools to determine what happened, until recently.
With grace, researchers can test the theory that ice loss is altering the form factor of the planet Earth. GRACE take pictures of the Earth's surface every 30 days, allowing researchers to observe changes in the ice mass to changes in gravity. Therefore, if there are changes in the shape of the Earth, then no change in the distribution of mass. Consequently, the gravitational field is also changing.
The researchers found that the melting of glaciers in Greenland and South Pole are the largest contributors to the inflammation of the "waist" of the earth all the water that leads to the equator. According to the data, the two hemispheres of the Earth loses 382 billion tons of ice per year. Reducing the burden that must be met by the continent allows the floor to get up and make the world a more rounded, but this process takes thousands of years. Meanwhile, growth in thickness in the Ecuador reaches 0.7 centimeters per decade.
Today, said Nerem, 21 km radius of the Earth in Ecuador is higher than at the poles. That is, the farthest point surface of the Earth from the core of the Earth is not at the top of Mount Everest, but on top of a volcano in Ecuador, which is closer to Ecuador.