
According to the Italian-based National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, the magnitude 8.9 earthquake that struck Japan on Friday caused the axis of the planet Earth to shift by approximately ten centimetres. Experts believe that "this has [shifted] the axis of rotation of the Earth [further] than the 2004 earthquake in Sumatra." 
According to La Nación, the impact of the Japanese earthquake caused an energy release one hundred times larger than that of the earthquake which struck Haiti in 2010. Leading the research at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Antonio Piersanti stated that "[o]ur estimate is not derived from direct measurements, which require much more time, but theoretical calculations." 
Richard Gross, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was responsible for discovering the extent to which the Earth's axis had been shifted by the 2010 Chile earthquake. He claimed that there "should be no impact [from] this change in rotation on daily life." 
Gross explained: "Although we have not evaluated the measurements of the Earth's rotation, my calculations indicate that the change in the distribution of land masses caused by the Japanese earthquake may have caused the Earth to rotate a little faster, shortening the length of day about 1.6 microseconds."  He said that despite the fact that "[t]his change in the position of the axis of rotation will cause the Earth to wobble a bit different[ly] as it rotates,"  the planet's axis would not alter in space.

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This is a complete or partial translation of the article "Tras el sismo en Japón, el eje de la tierra se ha desviado 10 cm", from the Spanish language Wikinews, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
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Japan earthquake shifts Earth's axis 10 centimetres