I had a professor once that likened large earthquakes to someone sneezing in a car parked at a drive in movie (remember them?).  It shakes the car but doesn't affect the operation of the vehicle much.
Stan

Ahhhhhhh  the good old days in the 51 chev pickup at the drive in.

We still have a drive in theatre in dodge. It is a great way to take grandchildren to the movie. They can run around and no one cares. We just pack up a cooler take the lawn chairs and have a great time. It is 12 dollars a vehicle to get in. They always have double feature. Mike

yup shift momma earth 3 ft on its axis, and reduced our day by 1.69 microseconds

they say the quake back in '02 (whereever that one was, i forget) shift the earths axis 6ft.

the results of both time and location won't effect weather or most of us in our daily lives, but
it will play hell with the gps systems and all those satellites in orbit that have to keep every coordinate
spot on,, over time the mapping will shift with ever increasing errors that will have to be accounted for.

so the next time tomtom tells you to turn right, don't get alarmed if you jump over the curb!



bob g

It all evens out, if an earthquake shunts in one direction it moves the earth a little that-a-way, then the next one shunts it the other way.  I wouldn't sweat it.

As for the time, they can't measure time that exactly, they're just guessing.  It might be 1.2 microseconds, or it might be 3 microseconds, who the hell cares?  Oh, I'm tired today, it must be because I got up 1.4 microseconds early?   
Stan

What the heck does the ability to measure the speed of the earth's rotation down to microseconds, have to do with keeping records of temperature to the degree C over many decades?
Stan


Edit...I dont' know anything about measuring the speed of the earth's rotation, (and don't really care) but here's a guy who apparantly does.  Taken from the Kansas City Star newspaper so take with a grain of salt.

"Richard Gross, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and colleagues calculated that Saturday's quake shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.

The length of a day is the time it takes for the planet to complete one rotation - 86,400 seconds or 24 hours.

An earthquake can make Earth rotate faster by nudging some of its mass closer to the planet's axis, just as ice skaters can speed up their spins by pulling in their arms. Conversely, a quake can slow the rotation and lengthen the day if it redistributes mass away from that axis, Gross said Tuesday.

Gross said the calculated changes in length of the day are permanent. So a bunch of big quakes could add up to make the day shorter, "but these changes are very, very small."

So small, in fact, that scientists can't record them directly. Gross said actual observations of the length of the day are accurate to five-millionths of a second. His estimate of the effect of the Chile quake is only a quarter of that span."

"Loon", that's the name of our dollar coin, the "loonie".  (cause it's got a picture of a loon on the back [or is it the front] of it), so don't you go dissin our money now, I hear they're going to change our paper based money to a form of plastic based money.  Evidently New Zealand has had it since 1990.  It's supposed to last much longer than the paper based stuff.

Anyway, I also hear that quite a few "flat earth" people are among the dedicated global warming hoax people. 
Stan