I'm not even sure anyone felt it...
> I'm not even sure anyone felt it...
Probably not when it is just a 1.3 magnitude.
Earthquake in Eastern CT> 0.04'
now everything is 0.04' out!!
Wow! Having always been close to a major fault system I am fascinated with quakes...
Our modern science is amazing... there is so much to learn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale 
Earthquake in Eastern CT> 0.04'
Was 0.04' out, now where it belongs.
Earthquake in Eastern CT> 0.04'
It was .04' out now its 0.08' out 😛
On a serious note...
I heard that the earthquake off the coast of Japan moved the earth's axis 10cm. Does anybody here know what this means? 10 cm relative to what? Did tho whole rotational axis move relative to the ITRF? Did the inclination of the axis change? Does this really mean anything to anyone (excluding geodisists)?
Don't laugh
You're in the fallout zone
According to the NRC, what U.S. nuclear power plant is most susceptible to catastrophic earthquake damage?
Don't laugh
What did Edgar Cayse say about the earth changing it's axis and Japan, Scandinavian countrie, England, California, New York falling in the sea? Supposedly the Earth's magnetic direction changes from north to south.
puddle-nami
Watch.... news at 11.
On a serious note...
The axis that moved is called the figure axis. This is an imaginary axis formed by pushing a line through the center of mass of the Earth. It is offset from the rotational axis of the Earth by some 30+ feet. Essentially, the Earth "wobbles" a bit in its rotation, and the center of mass traces out a small circle around the rotational axis.
Anything that affects the distribution of mass of the Earth will have some effect on the center of mass. Usually, in a large Earthquake, a portion of one tectonic plate gets "shoved down" underneath another one, pushing a large piece of mass closer to the center of the Earth. The rotational axis doesn't change, nor does the overall shape and location of the Earth. Instead, this has an effect similar to a spinning ice skater who pulls his/her arms in during the spin, and starts spinning faster as a result. Scientists call this "conservation of angular momentum".
In the Japan earthquake, scientists calculated that it should have shifted the figure axis by about 6.5 inches, increasing the Earth's spin by about 1.5 ms/day. This is a CALCULATED change, not a measured change. To my understanding, we can currently only measure the rotation of the Earth to something on the order of 20ms, so this change is an entire order of magnitude smaller than what we can detect that way. However, from my understanding, we can also measure the location of the figure axis to within something like 2 inches, so we could potentially see a shift that way.
However, the figure axis is actually moving constantly. Volcanoes spew magma from deep in the Earth up onto the surface, having the opposite effect, and slowing down the Earth's rotation. Even the filling of the Three Rivers dam in China is calculated to slow the Earth's rotation, but only by a very small amount. The movements of the tides and of high/low pressure air masses in the atmosphere actually have a bigger effect, making it very difficult to actually measure any change imparted by a single earthquake.
In our day-to-day life, the biggest effect we can expect this to have on us is that the future GPS almanac and ephemerides data might be slightly different than it would have been otherwise. In other words, the vast majority of people will see no noticeable effect at all, and its biggest impact may be to cause a flurry of interest in science (thus the press releases about it from NASA), but that's about it.
The rotational axis of the Earth doesn't really change. It goes through another sort of wobble called "precession", which is why Polaris is only really the North Star once every 24,000 years. If we wait another 10,000 years or so, the North Star will actually be off in Draco, I believe. And it theoretically undergoes very slight shifts as a result of gravity of the sun and moon and other planets operating on the uneven mass distribution of the Earth. But overall, having one or more moons seems to cancel out much of these variances, and moons seem to actually "hold" planetary rotational axes in place over the long haul. I know there's lots of BS on the web about massive shifts in the rotational axis, one of which was supposed to happen last week (and didn't, of course). But I gather that's largely caused by a giant game of "telephone", where one person reads something like what I mentioned in this post, then tells it to someone else who mangles and mis-remembers some of it while telling someone else, who then mangles it further when telling the next person, etc. Next thing we know, someone writes a nonsense article about what they've just heard and posts it on the web, and we're off to the races...
Don't laugh
Yeah... well Edgar has said/predicted a lot of things.
The Earth's axis has moved/flipped numerous times over the eons.
He's a very fascinating feller - don't get me wrong.
I'm a little suprised to hear of him mentioned here. Not to make fun, but when I hear about Wallace Black Elk or Mary Summerrain mentioned here I'll shocked.
Don't laugh
my mom is/was a huge Edgar Cayce reader.. I've read quite a bit of his and his son's work. I think he was one of the true real deals, somehow connected to the world in a way we just don't understand. and i'm a pretty skeptical sob!
Don't laugh
Big E... did you know that one of the most well respected Egyptologists started out studying Cayce? He even wrote a really wacky book,, totally alternative Egyptian history.. now he is mainstream, but I have a copy of it.
