When the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) lit up last Friday we headed for the hills. The 8.8 earthquake caused a tsunami threat for the entire Pacific ocean. We jumped in the golf cart and trundled up the hill to Lagarta Lodge for what turned out to be a long lazy breakfast overlooking an ultimately tranquil ocean and a fascinating conversation about our mutual inability to understand quantum theory. Another juicy conversation we all got stuck into the other day was about how patriotism is an overrated ‘virtue’ and that we (people generally) should all spend more time trying to get on with each other and less time waving flags. As if to emphasis the point, while we sipped our morning smoothies in Costa Rica, 17 time zones away, the first ASP Championship event of the year was on hold in Australia while they waited to see if the same tsunami would appear over there. It’s a pretty small world really. No tsunami showed up either on the Gold Coast (Australia) or The Rich Coast (Costa Rica) and on both coasts there were a surprising amount of people enjoying some pretty fun waves in spite of the possibility of a ‘Day After Tomorrow’ like wall of water appearing on the horizon at any moment.
What the earthquake did change however was just how long a day’s surfing would be in future (all though not by much admittedly). NASA announced on Monday that the earth’s axis has shifted after the 8.8 quake and now an earth day is 1.26 millionths of a second shorter. This was figured out by a clever chap called Richard Gross from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Steven Novella described it as being like a spinning ice skater pulling their arms in closer to the their body and subsequently spinning faster as a result. Richard Gross also estimated that the Earth’s figure axis shifted by about three inches, deviating roughly 33 feet from the north-south axis around which Earth revolves. The figure axis is the imaginary line around which the world’s unevenly distributed mass is balanced (apparently). Pretty cool stuff!
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