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Posted on 03/02/2010 10:22:45 AM PST by cajuncow
NEW YORK – Earth's days may have gotten a little bit shorter since the massive earthquake in Chile, but don't feel bad if you haven't noticed.
The difference would be only about one-millionth of a second.
Richard Gross, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and colleagues calculated that Saturday's quake shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.
The length of a day is the time it takes for the planet to complete one rotation — 86,400 seconds or 24 hours.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
This is really going to throw off the accuracy of my atomic watch. Can I get a refund?
Bush’s fault.
I rather doubt it. Any downslipping of the ocean floor simply pushed the Andes higher.
“This is really going to throw off the accuracy of my atomic watch”
Interesting point. I guess they can account for it over time as a reduction in the periodic leap second.
But if it had been several seconds, all current timepieces would have become deprecated.
What I don’t understand though is how a shift in axis of roatation equals a change in speed of rotation. We still have the same mass, so by conservation of momentum, the only way we can go faster is to reduce our diameter.
Ooops! shoulda RTFA.
As an interesting aside, I remember reading that when the Chinese complete and fill the 3 gorges dam, it was going to minutely slow the earth’s rotation, as it put more mass at a greater radius.
Maybe, this will cancel it out. :)
Send Hillary to the other side of the planet to shake her booty. That will quake everything back into sync
As if there already weren’t enough milliseconds in the day as it is.
Didn’t the groundhog predict this?
Redistribution of mass away from the center of axis.
Do volcano eruptions slow the rotation of the earth?
Al Gore has recently shaved, so any resemblance to a groundhog is strictly limited to crapping on the ground and sniffing other groundhog arses.
LOL!
Good.
Another Yahoo article has it as 1.26 milliseconds.
So, which is it? This is important! I need to know how much my misery has been reduced each day - by the negligible one millionth of a second, or the more significant one thousandth of a second.
” JPL research scientist Richard Gross computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the Feb. 27 quake. Using a complex model, he and fellow scientists came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake should have shortened the length of an Earth day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).”
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=2504
We are going to live longer because the days are shorter.
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