Chile's Quake = Shorter Day

Not by much, but still.

From 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 JPL in Pasadena, California.

“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”