Chilean Earthquake Moved Earth in More Ways Than You Think
While the deadly earthquake that rocked Chile on February 27 absolutely moved the Earth around quite a bit, the powerful shaker also knocked our planet off of its axis and shortened our day.
According to a NASA scientist, the Earth’s axis was altered by roughly 3 inches. A short search on the internet revealed that the Earth weighs an estimated 13 septillion pounds. That’s a 13 with 24 zeros after it. So, while in the grand scheme of things 3 inches may seem very small, that’s one big boulder to be tilting over.
However, while the Earth is a huge rock to be moving, this quake was nothing to scoff at. With a magnitude of 8.8 on the Richter scale, it produced roughly 67 exajoules of energy. As a basis of comparison, if the United States could have harnessed that energy, it would power the entire country for over four and a half years. The violent event was also equivalent to the explosion of 15.8 gigatons of TNT, a blast roughly 316 times more powerful than the largest nuclear explosion in history. In short, it was rather large and shook Chile quite a bit.
As was mentioned before, this quake also shortened our day. While it is probably impossible to perceive, our day is now 1.26 microseconds shorter. It’s a measurement of time that not even the Olympic judges would pay attention to. But again, keep in mind that the Earth is a pretty large object to be jostling this much. This effect, called the “ice skater effect,” is due to the massive amount of rock being moved, which changes the overall mass distribution of Earth, and thus the way it spins. They call it the ice skater effect because if you watch a figure skater spin, they rotate faster as they bring their arms closer to their body and change the distribution of their mass.
Other effects of the earthquake may be more perceivable. Santa Maria Island of the coast of the Chilean city of Concepcion may have lifted as much as 6 feet, and the resulting tsunami that swept across the Pacific has hit the Hawaiian Islands some 6,500 miles away and forced Japan to issue its own warnings another 4,100 miles away.
The current death toll sits at about 720 people, but as many as two million are displaced from their homes in the country that’s been rattled to its core.
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Various numbers were acquired using calculations from www.wolframalpha.com