Earth Science

Every earthquake has some unique characteristics to it because of the location, depth, and intensity. The Haiti 7.0 magnitude earthquake will be remembered for the massive devastation of life (200,000 killed?) and total destruction of a city (Port-au-Prince). The five hundred fold in power 8.8 earthquake in Chile only killed some 800 people; however, it was so powerful it shortened our day here on earth!

If the web bot linguisitcs are right and we have SIX earthquakes (7.0 and greater) after July 1st, how much of an impact could they have on world economics? What would happen to the digital world if one hits India and one hits between Taiwan and Japan? Who knows? Who can imagine?

Who wants to?

Scientists now believe that the earthquake 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.

Who knows this stuff anyway? 

“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second), and the axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches),” Gross said. So don’t worry, you’ll not notice any difference and you’ll still get paid the same wages each week.

Islands may have shifted, according to Andreas Rietbrock, a professor of Earth Sciences at the U.K.’s Liverpool University who has studied the area impacted, though not since the latest temblor. 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, Rietbrock said today in a telephone interview. He said the rocks there show evidence pointing to past earthquakes shifting the island upward in the past.

So, who says they aren’t creating more real estate?

“It’s what we call the ice-skater effect,” David Kerridge, head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, said. “As the ice skater puts when she’s going around in a circle, and she pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It’s the same idea with the Earth going around if you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes.”

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 to put the Chile quake into perspective. What we know is that the earth is going through some changes that we have no idea about or answers. Is this a build up or a precursor to some 2012 prophecies?

Stay tuned!