The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.
Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.
“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”
Monday, Mar 10th
Last update09:03:13 AM GMT
Headlines
SpaceX launched its huge Starship rocket on the program's eighth test flight Thursday, but a malfunction...
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is providing the best look yet at the chaotic events unfolding...
A commercial spacecraft carrying NASA experiments successfully touched down on the moon's surface early Sunday morning,...
As soon as the end of February, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will launch a...
