Posted: Mar 2, 2010 10:31 AM by Associated Press Earth's days
may have gotten a little bit shorter since the earthquake in
Chile. But don't feel bad if you haven't noticed. A NASA
scientist says the difference would be only about one-millionth
of a second. Richard Gross and his colleagues at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., calculated that
Saturday's quake shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds. A
microsecond is one-millionth of a second. An earthquake can make
Earth rotate faster by nudging some of its mass closer to the
planet's axis. That's the same way that ice skaters speed up
their spins by pulling in their arms. The length of a day is the
time it takes for the planet to complete one rotation - 86,400
seconds or 24 hours.