Antarctic Ice Melting Shifts Gravity

[The Anti-Targ]

Wow. Cool.

Forget whether it's caused by humans or not. The fact that melting Antarctic ice is causing changes in the Earth's gravitation field is so cool and science-fictiony. There must be a disaster movie in there somewhere.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/16851/20140930/gravity-dip-from-ice-loss-apparently-the-effects-of-melting-go-beyond-sea-level-rise.htm

Gravity dip from ice loss? Apparently the effects of melting go beyond sea level rise

Gravity itself is the newest casualty in the war on global warming. So much ice has melted in Antarctica that the gravitational field in the region was altered, new data from the European Space Agency shows.

The ESA's GOCE (Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer) satellite, which has spent four years orbiting the Earth and measuring the gravitational fields, is able to record Earth's gravity in better detail than any other satellite to date. The satellite showed a significant dip in the gravity over West Antarctica. ESA scientists announced on Friday, Sept. 26, that they could see a change in West Antarctica's gravitational field over the past four years, likely caused by melting ice.

Makes sense when you think about it. Gravity is a function of mass, and when you redistribute a large enough mass then gravity will change.