Quake Speeds up Earth's Rotation 


According to this article from Reuters, the Earth's rotation may have been sped up by a large shift of mass toward the center of the planet during the huge Indonesian quake from last week. Kind of like pulling in your arms in a spinning office chair, the Earth may have ditched 3 microseconds per day. Additionally, this mass shift also caused a wobble in the axis of about an inch. The poles already wobble something over 30 feet, so this isn't expected to change anything radically.

It's amazing that things like this could affect the planet as a whole in such a short period of time.

Update, January 11, 2005:

The fine folks over at NASA now have a nice informative page on this - this time with actual measurements as opposed to the theoretic mumblings of the previous article. The length of the day shortened by 2.68 microseconds and the "mean North Pole" shifted by 2.5 centimeters. Woo hoo! A pay raise!

Check out the page here.  

 

Posted: Tue - January 4, 2005 at 10:14 AM          

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