As the death toll from Saturday's 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile reached 795 today, scientists at NASA revealed that the tremors may have shifted the earth's axis and created shorter days
As the death toll from Saturday's 8.8-magnitude earthquake in Chile reached 795 today, scientists at NASA revealed that the tremors may have shifted the earth's axis and created shorter days
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The change is negligible, but permanent. Each day should be 1.26 microseconds shorter, according to preliminary calculations. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.
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Earth shattering: The Chile earthquake is said to be the fifth most severe in the world since 1900. Pic/AFP |
Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used a computer model to determine how the magnitude 8.8 quake that struck Chile on February 27 may have affected the earth.
He determined that the quake should have moved earth's figure axis about three inches. The figure axis is one around which the earth's mass is balanced. That shift in axis is what may have shortened days.
A large quake shifts massive amounts of rock and alters the distribution of mass on the planet. When that distribution changes, it changes the rate at which the planet rotates. And the rotation rate determines the length of a day.
"Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the earth's rotation," Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said while explaining the phenomenon in 2005.
However, such changes aren't unheard of. The magnitude 9.1 earthquake in 2004 that generated a tsunami in the Indian Ocean shortened the length of days by 6.8 microseconds.
Did you know?
The Mayans who predict that 2012 marks the end of the world are from Central America
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