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Chile Earthquake Altered Earth Axis, Shortened Day
from National Geographic News
Saturday's Chile earthquake was so powerful that it likely shifted an Earth axis and shortened the length of a day, NASA announced Monday.
By speeding up Earth's rotation, the magnitude 8.8 earthquake--the fifth strongest ever recorded, according to the USGS--should have shortened an Earth day by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to new computer-model calculations by geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
For comparison, the same model estimated that the magnitude 9 Sumatra earthquake in December 2004 shortened the length of a day by 6.8 millionths of a second. Gross also estimates that the Chile earthquake shifted Earth's figure axis by about three inches.
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