After massive earthquakes, many around the world are left wondering if there has been serious geophysical damage done to the earth.
But although some scientists and seismologists say that an 8-Richter earthquake can shorten the length of a 24-hour day and affected the rotation of the Earth’s axis, other experts say that on a grand scale, these effects are minimal.
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“It’s a really, really small effect,” said David Ogelsby, associate professor of geophysics at the University of California, Riverside, and an earthquake expert. “[With the March 2, 2010 Chilean earthquake], the center of the mass of the Earth shifted by about ten meters. That seems significant. But with the earth being over 6,000 kilometers in radius, this really a drop in the bucket.”
“These are minor, minor effects. It’s curious and measurable, but it doesn’t mean that it’s significant to people’s everyday lives,” Ogelsby told Aboutislam.net.
The ‘Butterfly Effect’
After reports of the massive magnitude of the earthquake in Chile began to emerge (news reports stated that it was the seventh largest earthquake in the world’s history), one scientist said that the length of the day had been shortened by 1.26 microseconds, and that there was a chance that the earth’s rotation could relax over time, sparking interest and questions from people around the world about how this would affect climate change and other geophysical factors.
Research scientist Richard Gross at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that the time change was permanent. His laboratory set up a computer model to determine the effects of the Chilean earthquake and found that the Earth’s figure axis had shifted by about three inches (or eight centimeters).
“This [time] change should be permanent,” Gross told Space.com. “Perhaps more important is how the quake shifted the Earth’s axis.” The length of an earth day is about 24 hours, which breaks down to 86,400 seconds. And, according to many Earth science websites, the length of a day does shorten by one millisecond every year.
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