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Author Topic: Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says  (Read 42 times)

CDJ

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Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says
« on: March 02, 2010, 12:05:31 PM »
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A ship in a harbor is safe, but that isn't what they were built for.

mike

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Re: Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says
« Reply #1 on: March 02, 2010, 12:39:41 PM »
“This small contribution is buried in larger changes due to other causes, such as atmospheric mass moving around on Earth,” Chao said.

I think that is a key statement.

The earth is not like a top, not exactly. Ya'll ever play with tops? You know, the sort of upside-down pear-shaped things you wind a string around and throw.....

Tops are 'rigid', their shape is formed and permanent.

The earth is 'fluid'. The earth, from centrifugal forces of its rotation, is a slightly flattened sphere.... the circumference at the equator is larger than the circumference around the poles.

So, you can be sure, on this partially fluid sphere, the constant continental drift and the intersecting and interfering plates and the resulting earthquakes and vulcanism, there are constant small aberrations and corrections in the orbital and rotational motions. It's not steady state. Other disturbances are working to lengthen or shorten the rotation.

I don't even want to think about all the variables (not to mention presumptions that may or may not be valid) that would have to go in to a computer model of such effects.

Mike
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CDJ

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Re: Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says
« Reply #2 on: March 02, 2010, 12:53:14 PM »
I like what you said, Mike, better than all that in the article.

And it ain't cause you mentioned 'tops' and  they didn't. (I was bad-azzed with my Top when I had the opportunity to play.  ;D )

CDJ
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A ship in a harbor is safe, but that isn't what they were built for.

mike

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Re: Chilean Quake Likely Shifted Earth’s Axis, NASA Scientist Says
« Reply #3 on: March 03, 2010, 05:00:35 PM »
I started doing tops with the steel pointed, wooden kind that is on the Top cigarette tobacco can. My mother got real tired of that, even before I blew the windows out of the garage with some other toys they repented of letting me have.

Then I got the plastic kind... .Duncan? Anyway, they were lots fatter, slower rotational speed but the same angular momentum, and they had a nylon point. So I wasn't banished to the garage with them.

The wooden, steel pointed ones I threw point down, with my index finger over the flat top, and the stringed side on the outside of my middle finger, and the end of the thumb.  The plastic ones I threw point up, with the index and middle finger on one side, and the thumb on the other side. I could split another top that was already spinning with the wooden one.

I was hexx with yo-yos, too.

But I was really in heaven when I discovered Wrist Rockets.
Mike Kemp
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