I would like to thank Phil at Bad Astronomy for bringing this video to my attention. It turns out gravity is not felt quite the same around the whole earth. Fortunately, for the last two years "ESA's GOCE satellite has gathered enough data to map Earth's gravity with unrivalled precision."
From these gravity measurements the GOCE team was able to produce the above video. What you see is known as a "geiod" and shows how gravity differs around the earth:
The geoid is the surface of an ideal global ocean in the absence of tides and currents, shaped only by gravity. It is a crucial reference for measuring ocean circulation, sea-level change and ice dynamics – all affected by climate change.This means (I believe) that if the earth was just an ocean feeling the same varying gravity that exists on our earth, the above video shows how our "ocean earth" would be deformed by these differences in gravitational pull. As you can see, the effects are very interesting and go a long way explaining why we have different currents and weather patters across the oceans.
