Friday, April 1, 2011
Chile Earthquake Victims
The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
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.
Same change is observe in Sumatra or in Tsunami.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.
How does an earthquake move the planet’s axis?
A sizable quake can shift huge amounts of rock, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. That change alters the rate at which the planet rotates, and rotation determines a day’s length. Scientists explained that the key to the shift was the location of the quake, and the fact that the fault sliced through Earth at a steeper angle, making “the Chile fault more effective in moving Earth’s mass vertically and hence more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis.”
Chile Fault Map
The Chile earthquake isn’t the first or the only natural disaster that changed the Earth’s shift. In fact, a day’s length was shortened by 6.8 microseconds after the tsunami of 2004. Benjamin Fong Chao of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland explained in 2005, “Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth’s rotation.”
Chile Earthquake Disaster:
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