Well I'm glad I got punched in the face by cop for no reason in Chicago rather than tased (tazed?), I guess...

If you want to get into some science about this, read Kogan et al., 2008 (here). Deployed GPS and accelerometers to the Verrazano-Narrows bridge during the 2004 marathon...

@LiC: Ehhh, I would argue the whole world has been lidar'd. ICESat was operational for nominally 17 campaigns between 2003 and 2009, on 33-day repeat orbits. So we do have a global laser altimetry dataset. Now you can argue based on the 65 m footprint (small) and quick repeats (33-days) that we don't have global…

@funakoshi.gichin.shotokan: Among other things, yes. That's the main one.

@cinnfhaelidh23: All the data is tide corrected I would imagine. The wake behind India is real (GRACE shows it too).

@minibeardeath: We do. It's because where there's tectonics, there's thicker crust (e.g. crustal root under the Himalaya, subducted crust underthe Marianas Trench region, etc.) More crust = more mass = more gravity. For the Iceland hotspot, the mantle is basically at the surface. Mantle = denser = more mass = more…

@Lite: an adventurer is me!: Isotope ratios don't lie. Yes you can skew the stats through dilution, but as long as you know (or estimate) the end-members of your system, you can calculate the exact dilution. Using ultra-clean methods, you can realistically measure certain elemental isotope ratios in femtograms of…

@Lite: an adventurer is me!: Because I'm no longer a geochemist. Switched to glaciology. Well that and I have a master's thesis to defend in... 63 hours. Kinda cramped for time here.

@Lite: an adventurer is me!: Pretty easy isotope equation to back calculate the ratio of conflict/non-conflict mineral if we have an ore sample from both places. All you need an mass spectrometer. I smell some Earth Science undergraduate theses... Step 1: Rip apart electronics. Step 2: Find ores from non-conflict…