According to NASA, the recent Chilean earthquake that took hundreds of lives also took away a part of the day. Just how much? With the magnitude of the quake, Earth’s axis has been tilted by roughly 3 inches (2.7 milliarcseconds to be exact) shortening the day by 1.26 microseconds. In the great expanse of time, Earth has probably lost a full minute if it had experienced numerous earthquakes each year, tilting the axis by inches every time (of course this only happes with quakes having magnitudes that move thousands of cubic miles worth of rock — the recent Chilean quake measured 8.8 on the Richter). Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds Read more »