A Windy Day Could Be Bad For You

Turns out, the recent earthquake in Chile went about doing something bad for all of us (or something good, depending how you look at a glass half-full of water). It reduced the length of a day by 1.26 microseconds.

Researchers at NASA believe that the Chilean earthquake jolted the Earth's axis and caused it to shift by a whopping 8 centimeters. And that has resulted in the day being shorter by 1.26 microseconds. For those of you who have heard of angular momenta, radii of gyration and all that voodoo, you know that a shift in the axis of an object can affect it's angular velocity and hence, it's period of revolution. So there you have it. An earthquake just rid me of that extra microsecond of sleep. Blasphemous.

And when I read about this in Scientific American, I also found out, that changes in atmospheric pressure have a greater impact on the period of a day than tectonic plate movements. As per the NASA scientists, the affect of wind on the length of a day is 300 times greater than that of an earthquake. So, the next time you're enjoying that bright, sunny and windy day, think about it. That sun may set pretty soon on you.