NASA’s New 3D Model Shows the Earth Is a Lumpy Mess
Javier CarbajalScienceJul 29, 2026 5:30 AMNASA’s New 3D Model Shows the Earth Is a Lumpy MessWe like to think of our home as a nice, smooth sphere. The slight, irregular bulges and depressions are caused by variations in the distribution of mass within the planet. NASA created this lumpy version of Earth using models and data from satellites, which can detect minute differences in gravity at different locations.
- ▪Javier CarbajalScienceJul 29, 2026 5:30 AMNASA’s New 3D Model Shows the Earth Is a Lumpy MessWe like to think of our home as a nice, smooth sphere.
- ▪The slight, irregular bulges and depressions are caused by variations in the distribution of mass within the planet.
- ▪NASA created this lumpy version of Earth using models and data from satellites, which can detect minute differences in gravity at different locations.
WIRED files mainly under tech. We currently carry 532 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | WIRED |
| Canonical URL | https://www.wired.com/story/nasas-new-3d-model-shows-lumpy-earth/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-29T09:36:03.488Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-29T09:36:03.488Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | T_STfn4a7xwS · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Javier CarbajalScienceJul 29, 2026 5:30 AMNASA’s New 3D Model Shows the Earth Is a Lumpy MessWe like to think of our home as a nice, smooth sphere. But mapping the Earth’s gravitational field provides a different view of the planet.The geoid is an equipotential surface that can be thought of as the shape an ocean surface would take due to the Earth's gravity field.VISUALIZATION COURTESY OF NASACommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storya new visualization of Earth looks nothing like the Blue Marble seen from space.NASA has released a new geoid model showing the shape of Earth’s gravitational field. The slight, irregular bulges and depressions are caused by variations in the distribution of mass within the planet.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at WIRED.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from WIRED
