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"It has an accuracy that's equivalent to about one second in 300 million years." - "If we've learned anything in the last 60 years of building atomic clocks, we've learned that every time we build a better clock, somebody comes up with a use for it that you couldn't have foreseen."

Oscillations started by the Sumatra-Andaman tsunami quakes last December are providing vital information about the composition of the Earth as well as the size and duration of the tremors, scientists have said. A team of international scientists led by Jeffrey J Park of the US has said that the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake produced the best documentation of Earth's free oscillations ever recorded, according to a press release posted in science portal EurekAlert. "This earthquake may resolve several controversies, such as whether a heavy slagheap of old tectonic plates is stuck near the core-mantle boundary beneath Africa, or even whether microscopic crystals...

Spawned by the South Asian earthquake, seismic waves rolling deep within the Earth made Virginia well water rise and fall by 3 feet, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. Strong oscillations at a 450-foot-deep well near the Round Meadow Country Club in Christiansburg in western Virginia started about an hour after the magnitude 9 quake struck some 9,600 miles away. Seismic waves travel through the Earth at about 7,400 mph. "It took another five hours for that sloshing to settle out," USGS groundwater specialist David Nelms said yesterday. "That water's going up and down, up and down, up and down in...