mascon
n.— «The scientists used gravity fluctuations measured by NASA’s GRACE satellites to peer beneath Antarctica’s icy surface, and found a 200-mile-wide plug of mantle material—a mass concentration, or “mascon” in geological parlance—that had risen up into the Earth’s crust.» —“Big Bang In Antarctica—Killer Crater Found Under Ice” Newswise June 1, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Need a book to lift you out of this world? Try Orbital (Bookshop|Amazon). In it, Booker-winning novelist Samantha Harvey imagines the moment-to-moment experience of living on a space station, a mixture of the mundane and the majestic, 250 miles...
Why would we describe something as having a meteoric rise when meteors fall to the ground? The adjective meteoric refers to the speed and duration of a meteor, not its direction. This is part of a complete episode.
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