"thats why I've been listing since Saturday"
Posted on 03/01/2010 2:21:45 PM PST by Fractal Trader
he earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
The changes can be modeled, though they’re difficult to physically detect given their small size, Gross said. Some changes may be more obvious, and islands may have shifted, according to Andreas Rietbrock, a professor of Earth Sciences at the U.K.’s Liverpool University who has studied the area impacted, though not since the latest temblor.
Santa Maria Island off the coast near Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, may have been raised 2 meters (6 feet) as a result of the latest quake, Rietbrock said today in a telephone interview. He said the rocks there show evidence pointing to past earthquakes shifting the island upward in the past.
[SNIP]
“What definitely the earthquake has done is made the Earth ring like a bell,” Rietbrock said.
The magnitude 9.1 Sumatran in 2004 that generated an Indian Ocean tsunami shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted the axis by about 2.3 milliarcseconds, Gross said.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com ...
Somebody better fine somebody over this...there is $$$$$ to be made!!! Get with it!!
Do you they adjust the international definition of the second, based on the wavelength of a certain atom?
Observers in Washington noticed a tiny shift to the right in the White House. ;^)
You can tell that Gross is not from the south,
or he would have said, “...the earth would ring
like a ten penny finishing nail hit with a greasy
ball peen hammer.”
Must of been Michelle’s booty.
"thats why I've been listing since Saturday"
Bush, Cheney and Rove have been busy
Hmmmm...difficult to call...
Bush's Fault!
Yaknow, I thought yesterday seemed a little shorter...
I hate when I lose 1.26 microseconds of sleep.
I wonder if this impacts systems like the GPS which rely on atomic clock levels of accuracy?
I would expect that a 3-inch shift in the earth’s axis would be likely to have more of an impact on global climate patterns than all of the man-made carbon emissions in history.
Is it tomorrow yet, ping.
Some earth nuts aver that global climate changes can impact tectonic events such as earthquakes, but I’ve never seen much made of the reverse of this thesis.
So how far did the north and south poles move?
Great...that means I’ll be lost 1.something seconds longer in the wrong direction.
The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
Anyone else think they basically just make this stuff up?
It means a polar bear looking north when the Chile quake hit might have found himself suddenly looking south instead.
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