Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A massive magnitude 8.0 earthquake on Tuesday off the coast of Chile, near the mining port of Iquique, sparked a tsunami warning for all of Latin America's Pacific coast, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said. "An earthquake of this size has the potential to generate a destructive tsunami that can strike coastlines near the epicenter within minutes and more distant coastlines within hours," it said.

(March 1) -- Apart from claiming the lives of hundreds of people and wreaking enormous property damage, Chile's massive earthquake has likely altered the distribution of the Earth's overall mass, scientists from NASA say. As a result, the length of a day is now a little shorter than it was before Saturday's magnitude 8.8 earthquake. "The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds [millionths of a second]," Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Bloomberg. "The axis about which the Earth's mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds [about 8 centimeters...