Mahakaleshwar Temple is located at the center of the strongest gravity anomaly or it is located at the densest spot in Indian subcontinent. Below is the extract of the original article published in Swarajyamag.
Mahakaleshwar Shiva temple of Ujjain lies beside the Kshipra River in southern Madhya Pradesh, atop the Malwa plateau. It is located on the Tropic of Cancer. The region’s bedrock is dense basaltic rock, formed by massive lava flows which occurred at the fag-end of the Cretaceous period, around 70 million years ago. These basalts are colloquially known as the Deccan Traps, and cover much of peninsular India.
The Surya Siddhanta, a remarkable astronomical treatise dated to around 1600 years ago, says that the location of Ujjain is unique because it marks the intersection point of the zero-longitude meridian with the Tropic of Cancer. That is why Mahakaleshwar’s home is also known as ‘the navel of the earth’.
However, this uniqueness was inferred a thousand years after the city was established – and also well after Ujjain had already become one of the seven sacred spots of the subcontinent.
This is where modern science intrudes, to offer us a fascinating reason why Ujjain has always been a unique spot: multiple gravity surveys reveal that Mahakaal’s Jyotirlinga is located precisely at the centre of the strongest gravity anomaly in the subcontinent.
(A modern gravity anomaly is measured by satellites, and is a measure of the earth’s surface density at a particular point. Oceans and sedimentary basins have low values, while mountain ranges, or thick layers of dense rocks, like our basaltic Deccan Traps, have high values. Low values are traditionally colour-coded in blues, and highs in reds)
Here is a regional gravity map extracted from NASA’s 2003 GRACE mission (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment). Note the location of the Mahakaleshwar jyotirlinga – at the centre of the red high, and the fact that the closest gravity anomaly of similar magnitude is thousands of kilometers away, in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago.
These findings were corroborated by a gravity survey conducted in 2006, jointly by the Geological Survey of India, National Geophysical research Institute, and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd.