Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says
Alex Morales writes on Bloomberg:
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).”
The changes can be modeled, though…
A Real Life Lex Luthor? Switzerland Geologist on Trial for ‘Causing Quakes’
A real life Lex Luthor… Was it all a real estate scam to create “beachfront” property in this land-locked country? Let’s find out. BBC News reports:
The head of a geothermal energy company has gone on trial in Switzerland accused of damaging property by triggering earthquakes. Markus Haering’s company had been working with the authorities in Basel to try to convert the heat in deep-seated rocks into electricity.
But the project was suspended in 2006 when drilling triggered the quakes.
They caused no injuries but led to $9m (£5.54m) of damage. Mr Haering denies deliberately damaging property.
The project was shut down permanently last week after a government study found that similar quakes caused by the project would lead to millions of dollars worth of damage each year.
Scientists Say That Earthquakes Never End
A train thrown down by the earthquake that struck San Francisco on April 18, 1906 (via Wikimedia Commons).
Steve Connor writes in the Independent:
Some of the most violent earthquakes that have occurred unexpectedly in places with no recent record of tremors may be the aftershocks of previous earthquakes that took place decades or even centuries ago, scientists have discovered.
Earthquakes usually occur at the boundary of two or more tectonic plates — the massive chunks of the earth’s crust that grind slowly against one another. However, they can also occur many hundreds of miles from a fault line and it is these earthquakes that scientists believe may be the result of long aftershocks rather than background seismic activity.
A laboratory study that tested how tectonic faults work has found that the further away…
