The Washington Post reports: A lot of people deny climate change. Not many, though, deny gravity.

That’s why a recent animation released by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — well, it came out in April, but people seem to be noticing it now — is so striking. Because it suggests the likely gravitational imprint of our changing climate on key features of the Earth in a way that’s truly startling.

The animation uses measurements from NASA’s squadron of GRACE satellites (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), which detect changes in mass below them as they fly over the Earth, to calculate how the ocean changed from April 2002 until July 2013, based on corresponding changes in the mass of the continents. The resulting animation suggests the oceans gained mass overall, as seas rose, albeit with seasonal variations that result from water moving from the continents into the seas and back again.

But in key areas where glaciers have been melting — coastal Alaska, West Antarctica and, above all, Greenland — it suggests something very different happened. Here, the animation finds that the ocean actually fell, and in some places by as much as 50 millimeters (2 inches) over this short decadal span: [Continue reading…]