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Gravity Map of Earth
dr3vil writes "Interesting results have been published by the GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) project, of the various gravity anomolies that exist at various places on Earth. The BBC report gives a good overview. Fascinating for me, a resident of California, to see us apparently sandwiched between a high and a low spot. Maybe that helps aids the tectonic flows around here?"
Looking at the detailed map, it's fair to say that, in the Western Hemisphere, Alaska sucks. Also, Montana seems to suck, and southern Mexico sucks, too. Colombia and Chile, though, really suck.
On the other hand, the Bermuda Triangle totally blows.
Interesting how the map relegates Europe to the fringes... I'm suuuuuuuure it's just because the Prime Meridian happened to cut France in half.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Well, inertially navigated submarines DO have a gravity map of the area they are operating in. At least the one's I was on.
The gravity map values are applied as correction factors to the inertial navigators.
The gyro's are attracted towards denser areas, which causes precession, which is picked up as an incorrect acceleration, and this throws the position of the inertial navigator off.
So we basically aplied a correction signal to keep the gyro's orientated to the correct reference planes in the math model so the 'real' accelerations could be correctly calculated.