After the devestating 8.8 magnitude earthquake that rocked Chile and the rest of the world on Saturday, scientists are now saying that the effects of the quake might actually shorten our days on Earth.
Don’t worry, we are not going to lose a day or two of each year, but the change is permanent: Each day should be 1.26 microseconds shorter, according to preliminary calculations. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.
When an earthquake hits, it moves a lot of rock under the ground, and this caused the Earth’s axis to slightly shift, which is the cause of the shortening. And the spinning of the earth is how we calculate how long a day is.
‘Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth’s rotation,’ Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said while explaining the phenomenon in 2005.
Scientists use the analogy of a figure skater…as they pull in their arms they spin faster. So, because of Saturday’s rocking of the globe, your day will be 1.26 microseconds shorter.
