For those of you that follow tide charts to the second, it will be interesting to see if they are now offset at all?
The Japan 8.9 earthquake was apparently large enough to result in a 10" axis tilt of the earth!
"It's going to make minute changes to the length of a day. It could make very, very tiny changes to the tilt of the earth, which affects the seasons, but these effects are so small, it'd take very precise satellite navigation to pick it up."
The earth's rotation will now shift at a different speed because the globe's mass has been redistributed, said Michael Bostock, a University of B.C. earthquake seismology professor.
He used an analogy of a figure skater pulling in his or her arms to spin faster because weight has been reorganized.
"Ultimately, if you change the length of day, you can change the length of time a given point on earth receives sunlight and doesn't receive sunlight," he said. "But will this affect us in our lifetimes? Absolutely not."
The researchers said that while the minuscule change may be completely undetectable, it still illustrates the punch behind the Japan's massive earthquake.
Read more:
Japan's quake shifts earth's axis by 25 cm
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