Chilean Quake Shifted Earth’s Rotational Axis
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on March 3rd, 2010 5:52 am by HL
Chilean Quake Shifted Earth’s Rotational Axis
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].”