Posted on 01/01/2005 9:38:48 PM PST by Coleus
Beyond killing tens of thousands and unleashing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, the twinned earthquake and tsunami that struck Southeast Asia Sunday altered the angle of the Earth on its axis, moved the North Pole, pushed walls of water throughout all the world's oceans and shifted the soil as far away as Newark, researchers are reporting.
Scientists said yesterday they are looking beyond the tragedy to try to extract meaning from an event of such magnitude. They want to learn how the Earth responds as a system to one of Nature's terrible jolts. And they wonder about the Earth's resilience.
Calculations performed by Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California show that the quake sped up the rotation of the Earth and enlarged its wobble, causing the length of a day to shrink permanently by 3 millionths of a second. It also moved the North Pole 1 inch, he found.
Researchers at the Lamont-Doherty facility in New York, part of Columbia University, have been tracking earthquakes for decades and say their instruments showed that the quake rang the Earth like a bell. Seismic waves emanated from the epicenter, like ripples moving out from a pebble thrown onto a pond surface.
Armbruster, the Lamont-Doherty seismologist, said that, though he hasn't completed his analysis, he believes the quake moved the soil in the Newark and greater metropolitan area by a half- inch. The temblor on the other side of the world pushed the ground up that far, then back down the same distance. The movement was so swift, it was not noticed by residents of the region, he said.
A well-studied 1964 quake in Alaska of a greater magnitude moved the ground in New York up 2 inches and then down 2 inches, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
I can't for the life of me remember who sung it, but it was quite a boppy tune.
Carole King, 1971.
Tisha5765Bav >>
Isn't that celebrated in the summer?
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