What Would Earth Look Like Without The Oceans?

That image looks familiar, right? It's lumpy! It's bumpy! It's shaped like a potato! It's ... not Earth without water. Not at all.

While this graphic went viral back in the mid-2010s, which convinced a lot of people that Earth was one weird lookin' pebble under all those oceans, Slate swooped in to debunk these claims. The animation originally came from a MATLAB script, packaged by Ales Bezdek, and what it actually depicts is the Earth's geoid, or gravitational field. Phony memes aside, that's actually quite interesting: what this image shows is how gravity is stronger at certain places than others, because the planet doesn't have the same density at every part of its interior. The hilarious part of all this? As Slate points out, this graphic actually shows what the Earth would look like if the entire planet were covered in water, ala Waterworld, or the exact opposite of what people say it shows. 

Never fear, though. There is a portrait of a water-free Earth out there. Coming at you in one, two, three ... 

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