Hi All. You have all heard about “cause and affect.” It appears that the Sumatra quake was the cause and it had one heck of an affect and not just to the local area, but on a global scale. Sort of like one of my sneezes.

I read in one report that New York City rose 2 inches and then went back down 2 inches. I wonder if anyone felt it? Anyway it’s always interesting to read the late news about something that has happened. You can sometimes learn what really happened. Take Care…Don in creepy town

In the hours after last month's Sumatra earthquake, an astonishing report began to circulate: So potent was the undersea jolt that it disrupted the planet's rotation, causing the day to shorten ever so slightly.

But did it? "The answer to this question is a definite yes," write NASA scientists Richard Gross and Benjamin Chao in an article published Tuesday in Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union. After plugging measurements of the Sumatra quake into a computer model, the scientists calculated that the quake sped up the planet's rotation - thus shortening the length of the day - by as much as 2.68 millionths of a second.

They also determined that the quake nudged the North Pole an inch closer to Northern Japan.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about these numbers is not their impact on daily life - essentially zilch, the scientists acknowledge - but that a single geophysical event like an earthquake can throw off an entire planet.

It turns out earthquakes are just the beginning. Chao and Gross, who have spent years cataloging and quantifying forces that affect the Earth's rotation and orientation, say that forces ranging from seasonal snowfall to the filling of China's Three Gorges Dam to the surging currents of the Earth's oceans exert a subtle, yet often measurable, influence on the twirl and tilt of the planet.

Theoretically, even an event as mundane as "a bus driving around town," they note, can have planet wide effect. "Anything that moves on the Earth will affect it," says Chao, a geophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/bal-hs.earth07jan07,0,2701124.story

http://web.reporter-news.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=QUAKE-TRUTH-12-30-04&cat=II

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/39330.html