Posted on 03/02/2010 6:51:32 AM PST by greatdefender
(March 1) -- Apart from claiming the lives of hundreds of people and wreaking enormous property damage, Chile's massive earthquake has likely altered the distribution of the Earth's overall mass, scientists from NASA say.
As a result, the length of a day is now a little shorter than it was before Saturday's magnitude 8.8 earthquake.
"The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds [millionths of a second]," Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Bloomberg. "The axis about which the Earth's mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds [about 8 centimeters or 3 inches]."
The speed that the Earth rotates also increased slightly in 2004 following the earthquake that struck off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. That 9.1 earthquake shortened the length of an Earth day by 6.8 microseconds, scientists say.
The reason is that sudden changes in the dimensions of the Earth's tectonic plates, like those experienced in the earthquakes in Chile and Indonesia, can alter the velocity.
David Kerridge, the head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, likened the change in rotation speed to what happens when a figure skater draws her arms in close to her body while spinning. "As she pulls her arms in," Kerridge told Bloomberg, "she gets faster and faster. It's the same idea with the Earth going around: If you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes."
Measure it with a micrometer, mark it with a grease pencil and cut it off with an ax.
Then declare the result to be “settled science.”
Haven’t we heard this “logic” before?
We be powerful!
“the length of a day is now a little shorter”
Look for further unexpected layoffs.
averaging the time a signal takes to transmit from one ‘fixed’ point to one in space can certainly be averaged when that signal travels at 187,000 miles per second
the delay in response is averaged between signals all the time. If that average changes to any measurable degree, you either have moving ‘fixed’ points or moving satellites, yet satellites also transmit to each other.
Aswesome. Obamarx now has 0.001329 less seconds left as POTUS...
The assumption is that the circumference decreased slightly, thus accelerating the rotation much as a figure skater accelerates her spin by pulling her arms inward. The angular momentum must remain constant.
< /liberal logic>
True. But an earth quake could correspondingly increase diameter as well (depending on the nature of the quake), which would have the opposite affect.
Cleric: [reading] And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit-bats and large chu...
Brother Maynard: Skip a bit, Brother...
Cleric: And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.
Brother Maynard: Amen.
All: Amen.
She throws out a thigh to power up the spin but I think her arms are mostly a wind resistance problem.
Gravity and our weight are a little less now if Earth is spinning faster. Speaking of weight I wonder what Hillary's flight to the Southern Hemisphere has done to Earth's wobble.
Gee, I wonder what this will do to globull warming?
Really? I could have sworn it was getting darker later.
Sounds like they are talking about a close passage of an asteroid/comet. When a natural phenomena is misunderstood, the survivors attribute it to a god.
Different manouvre !
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Mother Earth just gave us less time to sleep. When Mother ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
matthew
Once upon a time, I made fiber optic gyroscopes for a living. The FOGs we made were for tactical applications, not high-accuracy navigation. However, we could still easily measure the Earth’s rotation with our gyros. A high accuracy gyro would be more than able to measure such a small change in angular momentum.
Wow. That’s very interesting. Guess I need to get out more! Appreciate the info!
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