Quake may have shortened
days by microseconds forever

From Reuters via the Houston Chronicle:

The deadly Asian earthquake may have permanently accelerated the Earth's rotation -- shortening days by a fraction of a second -- and caused the planet to wobble on its axis, U.S. scientists say.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorized that a shift of mass toward the Earth's center during the quake Sunday caused the planet to spin 3 microseconds, or one millionth of a second, faster and to tilt about an inch on its axis.

When one huge tectonic plate beneath the Indian Ocean was forced below the edge of another "it had the effect of making the Earth more compact and spinning faster," Gross said.

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Weird. I don't really have anything to add (the article goes on to point out that such a change is ultimately insignificant) other than that it must have been one hell of an earthquake. But I guess everybody already knew that.

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