Did the earthquake in Chile shorten the weather?

"The earthquake in Chile is getting shorter every day!" A few days ago, scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States were surprised to say that the strong earthquake of magnitude 8.8 in Chile is so powerful that it may tilt the earth's axis and cause the earth's rotation axis to shift, shortening the human day by 1.26 microseconds (that is, 1.26 seconds per million).

On March 1, Richard Gross, a geophysicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA, California, USA, used a computer model to calculate the impact of strong earthquakes in Chile. He said: "A strong earthquake can move rocks for several kilometers and change the distribution of the earth's mass, thus affecting the earth's rotation."

Sun Shizhen, a researcher at China Seismological Network Center, also told this reporter: "The position of the earth axis in the earth is not fixed, and it will move slightly with the crustal movement, resulting in a' pole shift'." According to Gross's estimation, the earthquake in Chile may have shifted the earth's rotation axis by 2.7 milli-angular seconds (about 8 cm).

Gross explained that any large-scale movement of the earth will affect the rotation speed, and large-scale earthquakes will affect the global distribution of seawater volume and quality, thus changing the rotation speed of the earth, and it is the rotation speed that determines the length of Earth Day.

In this regard, David Kerr Coleridge, head of the Earth Hidden Dangers and Systems Department of the British Geological Research Center, also confirmed: "This is what we call the figure skating effect. When the figure skater turns around, the bigger the arm of the skater is, the slower the rotation speed is; And if he puts his arm close to his body, his rotation speed will increase. The reason for this phenomenon is that his mass distribution has changed. The earthquake in Chile also had a similar impact on the earth, which led to the acceleration of the earth's rotation and the shortening of time. "

Gross said on the 2nd that the length of the earth's day has changed in a calculable way, so a series of major earthquakes will shorten the day. Although these changes are very small, the changes caused by the earthquake can be calculated by the model. The Sumatra earthquake of magnitude 9, which triggered the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, moved the earth's axis by 2.3 milliangular seconds (about 6.8 cm), thus shortening the time of the day by 6.8 microseconds. According to Gross's analysis, the magnitude of the 2004 earthquake.

This small change may be difficult to detect and it is difficult for researchers to record directly, but it has certain influence on aerospace, satellite communication, global positioning system and other fields. Zhao Feng, dean of the Earth Science Research Institute of Taiwan Province Central University, also pointed out that once these changes happen, they cannot be recovered and will last forever.

In addition to distorting the earth's axis, Chile's M8.8 strong earthquake has also brought a series of more significant changes to the earth.

Anders, a professor of earth science at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, said: "The 8.8-magnitude earthquake raised the island of Santa Maria off the coast of Concepcion, Chile's second largest city, by two meters."

The epicenter of this strong earthquake is located on the seabed near Chile. The earthquake occurred along a fault, and the 9.5-magnitude earthquake in Chile in 1960 also occurred along this fault zone. The pressure exerted by two strong earthquakes on this fault zone has caused a fault zone about 35 kilometers deep on the seabed here, and the length of the fault zone exceeds 600 kilometers. In addition, on this fault zone, the Nazca plate under the East Pacific Ocean south of the equator also slipped under the South American plate.