Source: BusinessWeek

March 1 (Bloomberg) — The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist said.

Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects.

“The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross, said today in an e-mailed reply to questions. “The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”

Alright, so now cities are being destroyed, tsunamis are being created, the earth is warming up, AND the length of the days are changing? I don’t know about you, but this isn’t something that sounds “normal” as I’m sure the skeptics will say. I realize that we’re not talking about noticeable differences here, but then again, it’s only 2010. Who knows what’s in store in the coming years…