Saturday, January 8, 2011

Physics Context: The Quake May Have to Change the Rotation of the Earth


Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California Machinery theorized that transfer large amounts of mass in the center of the Earth on the deadly earthquake on Sunday, December 26, 2004 and has accelerated the rotation of the Earth as much as 3 microseconds where 1 microsecond is one millionth of a second and move at 1  2:54 inches or centimeters from the axis.
When one tectonic plate under the Indian Ocean shifted to overlap with another plate, "plate has the power to reduce the size of the Earth and make it spin faster," Gross said.


Gross says this model may be too small to be detected by the Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) that is routinely observed rotation of the Earth Because of this added to the long term is not so significant.


"Rotation is not the same from time to time but actually slowed the Earth. If there are minor changes, scientists must add a" leap second "at each end of the year, something never done before," Gross said again.


"Scientists have long theorized that changes on Earth's surface such as tide and the movement of ground water and weather can affect the rotation of the Earth but they do not yet have a way to measure it," added an expert on seismology Hiroo Kanamori of the California Institute of Technology.


"Even for a very large event, the effect is very small," Kanamori said, "It is very difficult to change the rotation rate substantially."





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