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Japan Earthquake May Have Shifted Earth's Axis
Zothecula writes "Using a complex model to perform a theoretical calculation based on a US Geological Survey, Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has determined that by changing the distribution of the Earth's mass, the earthquake that devastated Japan last Friday should have sped up the Earth's rotation, resulting in a day that is about 1.8 microseconds (1.8 millionths of a second) shorter."
Newton still right!
Basic principles of mechanics remain sound!
Film at eleven.
The speed of the Earth's rotation changes every time I ride an elevator, too. (Please resist the temptation to make a fat joke here; it's too obvious to be worth the trouble.) On a more impressive scale, there's a significant and variable amount of angular momentum stored in the atmosphere. Changes in major air currents year over year (things like El Nino, for instance) can change the length of the day by close to a millisecond: hundreds of times more than this little earthquake.
~Idarubicin