5 Spots on Earth Where the Laws of Physics Fall Apart
There are some places on the planet where things get weird. For instance, you ever heard of the Bermuda Triangle? Well, it turns out there’s nothing weird about that bit of the ocean at all — it sees a lot of traffic, but vessels that travel there are no more at risk than those anywhere else. Yeah, forget about the Bermuda Triangle; we don’t know why we brought that up.
But other spots? Other spots really are weird.
Gravity Drops Near Sri Lanka
Students in school learn that on Earth, gravitational acceleration is equal to 9.81 m/s². That number is really the average gravity across the planet, because the force varies from place to place. Once you know that, it’s surprising we make kids do math with that needlessly exact figure. 9.8 would be an easier number to deal with (and is a more accurate number, in some places). Even “10” would be a reasonable number to give to kids, if all we need to do is teach them to use formulas correctly.
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Gravity varies from place to place — and in some places, it varies a lot. In the ocean near Sri Lanka, gravity is so much weaker than in the rest of the world that the sea level is more than 300 feet lower than it would otherwise be. You might imagine that water levels would drop in places with high gravity, rather than low gravity, because the ground pulls the water down so hard, but think about it some more. Low gravity means every other part of the world is pulling on the ocean harder, so less water collects near the gravity anomaly.
This spot is called the Indian Ocean Geoid Low. To know why gravity’s so low there, we’d have to burrow deep into the planet, and possibly cut it in two, which is inadvisable. Barring that, we do have some good theories. We think that part of the Earth has an unusual amount of liquid magma, so it’s less dense. This magma is left over from when the Indian tectonic plate smashed into Asia fairly recently.
By “fairly recently,” we mean around 50 million years ago, which is pretty recent, all things considered. The geoid may only last for another 100 million years, so you better hurry up and visit it while you can.
The Toasty Bit of Norway
In the Norwegian Sea, we have one disturbing bit called the Lofoten Vortex, where the water stores an unusual level of heat. The issue here isn’t recent climate change — this part was absorbing and releasing such a level of heat back in the 1970s, too. The ocean here has no ice and even boasts its own coral reef.
The culprit? Anticyclones.
In the northern hemisphere, large systems like storms rotate counterclockwise. When the water instead rotates clockwise, we call that an anticyclonic eddy, and in the Lofoten Vortex, it leads to high temperatures and waters full of stirred-up nutrients. That may not be exactly what you’re seeking when you venture up to the Arctic Ocean, but we’re told the dolphins there love it.
On Top of Paraguay, Magnetism Disappears
We’ve got another diagram of the Earth for you, showing how forces change from one area to the next. Here, we’re looking at the magnetic field’s strength. You’ll see the field suddenly plunge somewhere over South America.
Without looking at the map, if you had to guess one spot where the magnetic field gets weird, maybe you’d point your finger at one of the poles. But the planet’s rotational axis, which defines where we put the north and south poles, isn’t the same as its magnetic axis (which creates the magnetic field). As a result, we have this belt of radiation around the globe that dips down and comes close to us at this unlikely spot above Paraguay. That leads to a weak magnetic field and a whole lot of radiation.
We call this the South Atlantic Anomaly, and down on the ground, we don’t need to worry about it. A “dip” in the inner Van Allen radiation belt still places the radiation more than a hundred miles above the Earth’s surface. But when we’re flying through space close to Earth, this twist in radiation and magnetism can screw with everything. The Hubble telescope can’t work when it passes through here, and it passes that way 10 times a day.
A satellite that cost a quarter billion dollars split apart and exploded in 2016, and the South Atlantic Anomaly was why. Oh, and when the space station orbits around here, laptops crash. That’s why the computers that run the station are much simpler and more reliable. They’re slower than the chip you’re using to read this article, but they don’t shut down every time they pass through space’s mystery spot.
The Tulsa Center of the Universe
You might not have known that the center of the universe is in Tulsa, but that’s what this spot is named, and Oklahoma wouldn’t lie to us.
Sound goes wonky here. Make a noise, and it echoes back to you louder than when you made it, but people outside a small perimeter don’t hear it at all.
The most convincing explanation about what’s going on here is that sound bounces off a wall. You’ll find many domes worldwide that will echo sound back to you in a surprising manner. Only, this spot isn’t surrounded by a wall. Also, we have no explanation for why sound doesn’t travel beyond a fixed distance, given the absence of any barrier around it.
We’d go investigate ourselves, but that would mean having to spend time in Tulsa. And if we did that, well, then we’d have so much fun going out to dinner with our friends at Mahogany Prime Steakhouse that we’d completely forget to complete the assignment that brought us to town.
The Cave Where Energy Comes from Rock
All energy in the food chain comes from the Sun. Plants get energy from sunlight. We get energy from eating plants. Other times, we eat animals that eat plants, and either way, the Sun’s ultimately powering us.
Some tiny biomes receive no sunlight at all. For example, you’ll run into caves that are totally dark, and organisms still live in there. That’s because they get a steady stream of biomass from outside, and the residents feed on that. Maybe a stream runs in full of dissolved organic matter. Maybe bats regularly fly in and deposit their guano.
But then you have Movile Cave in Romania. The interior is totally cut off from the outside world, and the creatures in there get no energy through photosynthesis, either directly or indirectly. Instead, the producers of this food web are bacteria that get their energy through chemosynthesis. They oxidize the rock of the cave, as well as methane that comes from the ground. These bacteria are eaten by fungi, which get eaten by snails...
...and crustaceans...
...and water scorpions:
Dozens of species in this cave are found nowhere else on Earth, which is a relief. It also makes sense, considering the unusual foundation that supports them.
Now that we know it’s possible for organisms to get energy without sunlight, perhaps we humans will be able to survive if we blacken the skies one day, to defeat the solar-powered robots. Many theories exist about this plan, but there’s only one way to find out for sure.
You know what to do.
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