"The powerful earthquake that killed hundreds of people in Chile on Saturday probably shifted the Earth's axis and made days slightly shorter, a Nasa scientist has said.""Richard Gross, a research scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, calculated how much the axis may have changed in position following the the disaster.
If the planet's axis did shift by 8cm during the quake, days would have shortened by 1.26 microseconds, Mr Gross calculated. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.
Earth days are 24 hours long because that is the amount of time it takes the planet to make one full rotation on its axis, so shifting the axis would affect rotation.
The quake shifted the Earth's axis by even more than the 9.1-magnitude tremor off Indonesia that started the deadly tsunami in Asia in 2004, according to Mr Gross.
This was partly because the fault line responsible for the quake in Chile "dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake", he said.
The different angle made Saturday's tremor more effective at moving Earth's mass vertically and shifting the planet's axis, Mr Gross continued.
The 2004 quake in Asia, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused the Earth to move by around 7cm.
It chopped an estimated 6.8 microseconds off the length of a day, Nasa said"
This is not a typical Belsize blog, but since this severe event has such significance to world climate, this does serve as a reminder of the fragile world that we inhabit. Who can say if the collective effects of reducing our CO2 emissions in the UK, together in Camden and Belsize will have more or less impact than the loss of 1 micro second to a day.
But one thing is clear the need to reduce climate CO2 and thus helping to prevent a non reversible trend to incresed "global warming". Most scientists agree we have at best less than 10 years to drastically to turn the tide of a non reversible trend. Hansen (NASA).
Author: Nigel Rumble
Quotes: Sky News 2010
