Locally, we had a big snowstorm coming. Storm was part of the pattern this winter, would have dumped around 4 inches on us then been moving on and dumping another big slug of snow on the northeast. Earthquake hit. Storm didn't happen.Seems to be the other way around. The shift of the massive plates wobbles the earth enough to shift it on its axis and erase time.
Brian Williams actually touched on this on the Nightly News.
My understanding, after reading online, was the earthquake actually shifted enough land mass in that area to cause the Earth's axis to reorient to compensate..
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A large quake shifts massive amounts of rock and alters the distribution of mass on the planet.
When that distribution changes, it changes the rate at which the planet rotates. And the rotation rate determines the length of a day.
"Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth's rotation," Benjamin Fong Chao, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said while explaining the phenomenon in 2005.
Scientists use the analogy of a skater. When he pulls in his arms, he spins faster.
That's because pulling in his arms changes the distribution of the skater's mass and therefore the speed of his rotation.
Checking with 40 some-odd online friends all over the country via IM, same thing. Big storm was expected, never happened.
The storm shifted radically south and greatly weakened, with no explanation whatsoever. The jet stream shifted as well. The El Nino effect seems to have dissipated, about six weeks early by my local PhD meteorologist's estimate.
Agreed this is all anecdotal, but as my local guy said -- it's as good of an explanation as any. And better than any he had, since he hadn't thought of cause and effect re: climate changes and earth shifting on its axis.
Again, the towering power of nature makes us look like what we are -- gnats. Amoebas. Insignificant.
A message not popular for the warmers.
El Nino is an event where warmer than usual water pools in the Pacific. While the Great Tsunami never happened, the Pacific did slosh around enough to break up pools and disrupt currents at least temporarily.
That sloshing has a direct and immediate effect on all aspects of the weather in the continental US, since almost all of it originates or is affected by systems and winds coming off the Pacific. Those being largely determined by currents and ocean temperatures.
The tiny fraction of a degree of tilt quakes this size cause in the Earth's axis have never been linked to weather changes that are either significant or immediate. Enough tiny shifts will cause long-term climate changes, see the Sahara Eden theory as one example. But one won't do it.
Does any of this prove or disprove man made global warming? Got me. What does one have to do with the other?