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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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The article didn't explain it very well, so I'll ask here. The article said mantle plumes are responsible for the lower gravity in the area. Is this because the magma has a lower density than the surrounding mantle?
The article references the original study, which itself has a "plain language summary", which I will now quote
Now, I'm a geophysicist, so I understand this. But I would argue that this is not plain language, haha. Scientists are so bad at this. So let me run this through my handwavey physics explainer.
The hot plumes have lower density than the surrounding material. This is due to basic rules of thermodynamics: if you heat something up, either the pressure rises, or the volume increases. In this case, the volume of the hot plume increased, making it less dense. It's also the reason the plume is rising to the surface. Note that it's rising on the timescales of hundreds of millions of years. So, if the mantle material is less dense in that spot, then there's physically less matter there to create gravity in that spot.
The difference in gravity between there and where-ever you are -- is probably not noticeable unless you have a very sensitive instrument. In high school physics, you learn that gravity is 9.8 m/s² -- and that's fairly accurate. But if you add a bunch of decimal points to that, you start to see variations. Across the whole earth, it varies from 9.78 (near the equator) to 9.83 (near the poles), and there's other small variations regionally. This "gravity hole" (I hate that term) is just a location with slightly less gravity than average if one were to assume the earth were made of a uniform material.
Also, this headline feels familiar, because stories like it are published repeatedly: See this headline from 2017, for example: https://iisc.ac.in/scientists-find-out-the-cause-for-geoid-low-in-the-indian-ocean/ or this one from 2019: https://eos.org/science-updates/seismologists-search-for-the-indian-oceans-missing-mass