Sorry, peeps, but this is mislabeled. As should honestly be pretty obvious when you compare it to a picture of Earth from space:
However, I can’t entirely blame people for being fooled; reverse-google-imaging it will give you hundreds of shady gif-collecting sites labeling it “earth without water.” But this is also not true.
This is where it originally comes from (hooray for Tineye). If you don’t want to bother to check the link, it’s the page for a Matlab program designed to image geoscience data. That gif is a map of gravitational field strength across the earth… exaggerated by a thousand. Here’s what it looks like not exaggerated:
As you can see, significantly less potato-y. But still lumpy, because that’s the whole point of the program: to show areas where the numbers are higher as higher and areas where the numbers are lower as lower.
As the page itself points out, in real life, the Earth is very close to a sphere. However, there’s a pretty simply and logical reason for this: gravity. Things that are in higher areas relative to the center of the planet will tend to move downhill, resulting in the lower parts being filled and the higher parts getting shorter.
So, you know, if you ever run into any of those loony intelligent-designers an earlier commenter mentioned, now you know the REAL reason they’re wrong.
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