Empirical Earth · Gravity, Buoyancy & the Air

The lumpy geoid picture — the caption gives the exaggeration as 10,000

The claim

“NASA’s own new image shows the Earth is a lumpy potato, not a ball.”

What is true

◆ Refutation The image is real and it is NASA’s.

What is measured

The whole range of the surface shown is 191 meters, which is 3 parts in 100,000 of the radius. Multiplied by ten thousand, that 191 meters becomes 1,910 kilometers of relief on a 6,371 kilometer radius, and the picture becomes a potato. The lumps in the image are a slider setting, and the slider setting is written in the caption.

What would show this is wrong

a geoid model at true scale, from any agency, showing departures from the reference ellipsoid of more than a few hundred meters; or a published geoid visualization that does not state its vertical exaggeration factor.

Sources

  1. NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, The Geoid, released 15 July 2026. The caption states that the geoid height ranges from +85 m (Iceland) to −106 m (southern India) and that in this visua link
  2. Kvas, A. et al. (2021). GOCO06s, a satellite-only global gravity field model. Earth System Science Data 13, 99–118. The peer-reviewed model behind the visualization. essd.copernicus.org link
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