Posted on 01/01/2005 9:38:48 PM PST by Coleus
Beyond killing tens of thousands and unleashing a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, the twinned earthquake and tsunami that struck Southeast Asia Sunday altered the angle of the Earth on its axis, moved the North Pole, pushed walls of water throughout all the world's oceans and shifted the soil as far away as Newark, researchers are reporting.
Scientists said yesterday they are looking beyond the tragedy to try to extract meaning from an event of such magnitude. They want to learn how the Earth responds as a system to one of Nature's terrible jolts. And they wonder about the Earth's resilience.
Calculations performed by Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California show that the quake sped up the rotation of the Earth and enlarged its wobble, causing the length of a day to shrink permanently by 3 millionths of a second. It also moved the North Pole 1 inch, he found.
Researchers at the Lamont-Doherty facility in New York, part of Columbia University, have been tracking earthquakes for decades and say their instruments showed that the quake rang the Earth like a bell. Seismic waves emanated from the epicenter, like ripples moving out from a pebble thrown onto a pond surface.
Armbruster, the Lamont-Doherty seismologist, said that, though he hasn't completed his analysis, he believes the quake moved the soil in the Newark and greater metropolitan area by a half- inch. The temblor on the other side of the world pushed the ground up that far, then back down the same distance. The movement was so swift, it was not noticed by residents of the region, he said.
A well-studied 1964 quake in Alaska of a greater magnitude moved the ground in New York up 2 inches and then down 2 inches, he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
---Boston's $14 billion Big Dig is creating an inland flood---
Aren't those machines they use to dig come from France? Are the French back in the canal business? I think there was a big write-up in National Geo about what cutting edge civil engineering was underway.
Of course the tidal friction with the moon changes the earth's rotation speed because it is the angular momentum of the entire earth-moon system that is conserved -- although the rotation slows down, the moon gets correspondingly further away (3 millimeters further away every month). At the time of the first dinosaurs, 250 million years ago, the moon was 5 or 6 thousand miles closer (which is still a small change compared to the current variation in the moon's distance from earth -- annular eclipses were still possible then, and total eclipses will still be possible for another 500 million years).
People trying to impress us with how smart they are.
I'm not buying any of this information. They don't
know all of the factors and are just speculating...
AHA!, that must mean something ..but what?!
Good night, Calpernia.
ping
It must be global warming -- brought on by Bush and the evil capitalists! =)
I believe the rotation of earth could speed up if the high points on earth slid into low points. It would be like a skater who draws in his arms to accelerate the spin.
The earth spins like a top and the tilt changes like a top over VERY long time periods, I think the change may be as much as 5-7 degrees.
Yeah, I know, my comment was in response to the authors claim that Earths rotation speed had " permanently" changed. That statement is clearly wrong.
See 52.
BTW, the French are good at making disposable products, I must admit.
It is not friction. The moon pulls a bulge in the ocean. Because the earth rotates faster than the moon orbits the earth, this bulge is ahead of the moon. This bulge pulls the moon to go faster and the moon pulls on the bulge, slowing the earth.
Basically, any object inside geosynchronous orbit will slow down itself and speed up the earth. Outside and the object will gain energy and slow down the earth. One of the 2 martian moons is inside geosync orbit and will crash into mars. Our moon is outside geosync orbit and eventually will drift away.
True, but we are talking only 3 microseconds here. That is about 1 part in 10 billion.
You are absolutely correct. This is OBSERVABLE science. As opposed to the anthropogenic global warming make it up as you go along type of science.
Thanks for the correction. I knew about the plates spreading in the Atlantic and colliding and sliding under one another in the Pacific. I knew there had been a tsunami in Lisbon in the 1700s, but wasn't clear on the cause. If that same one had affected the East Coast, or Central or South America, wouldn't there be some information about it in history? I don't remember ever hearing about it.
The GPS satellites can receive updates from ground stations to adjust ephemeris data. I just received notification from Delorme with updated magnetic declination files for all my mapping products (Street Atlas USA 2003-2004). The north pole has moved enough that current software products and printed maps show an incorrect magnetic north deviation. Those updates were announced BEFORE the quake.
How and Why were they anounced before the quake?? Or were there enough other quakes to make a difference? So what you are telling me, is, I need new software for my gps to work corectly?
And you are?
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