The monster tremor in Chile killed at least 800 people and supposedly moved gigantic masses around the planet. NASA had reported that the catastrophe shifted the Earth’s axis and made a day shorter by a fraction. But now German researchers have said that the claims are completely without basis.
Who are you going to believe - scientists from the most anal, precise nation in the world, or the guys who crashed a dune buggy on Mars.
NASA scientists said on Tuesday that the earthquake moved the Earth’s axis by eight centimetres; Richard Gross used a computer model to come to this conclusion. He also claimed that days will become shorter by 1.26 microseconds.
“Unverifiable,” declared a top German scientist as he put the Earth back on track. Professor Rainer Kind (that's a hardcore name) from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam said: “It is highly doubtful that these calculations are correct. The changes to the Earth’s axis caused by an earthquake would be so tiny that it isn’t measurable and therefore impossible to reliably detect.”
Existing calculations of the movement of the Earth’s axis by past earthquakes are still being debated, the expert added. Professor Karl-Heinz Glassmeier from the Deutschen Geophysikalischen Gesellschaft (you mean, German Geophysical Association?) also criticised the alleged discovery: “NASA can only make the headlines with it. A figure of eight centimetres is absolutely unverifiable.”
The influence of an earthquake on the Earth’s tilt would in any case be extremely low, explained Dr. Mojib Latif from The Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel. He said, “The heavenly bodies around us are mainly responsible for the Earth’s tilt. The gravity of the heavy and big planets in particular determines the gradient of the Earth’s axis. "That can not be changed by an earthquake, even one as powerful as that in Chile.”
Professor Kind added: “It is impossible that there could ever be such a severe earthquake which would observably move the Earth’s axis. That would only be possible through outside influences, for example a meteorite.
Good enough for me. Besides, those Germans sound scary.
Who are you going to believe - scientists from the most anal, precise nation in the world, or the guys who crashed a dune buggy on Mars.NASA scientists said on Tuesday that the earthquake moved the Earth’s axis by eight centimetres; Richard Gross used a computer model to come to this conclusion. He also claimed that days will become shorter by 1.26 microseconds.
“Unverifiable,” declared a top German scientist as he put the Earth back on track. Professor Rainer Kind (that's a hardcore name) from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam said: “It is highly doubtful that these calculations are correct. The changes to the Earth’s axis caused by an earthquake would be so tiny that it isn’t measurable and therefore impossible to reliably detect.”
Existing calculations of the movement of the Earth’s axis by past earthquakes are still being debated, the expert added. Professor Karl-Heinz Glassmeier from the Deutschen Geophysikalischen Gesellschaft (you mean, German Geophysical Association?) also criticised the alleged discovery: “NASA can only make the headlines with it. A figure of eight centimetres is absolutely unverifiable.”
The influence of an earthquake on the Earth’s tilt would in any case be extremely low, explained Dr. Mojib Latif from The Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel. He said, “The heavenly bodies around us are mainly responsible for the Earth’s tilt. The gravity of the heavy and big planets in particular determines the gradient of the Earth’s axis. "That can not be changed by an earthquake, even one as powerful as that in Chile.”
Professor Kind added: “It is impossible that there could ever be such a severe earthquake which would observably move the Earth’s axis. That would only be possible through outside influences, for example a meteorite.
Good enough for me. Besides, those Germans sound scary.
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