NavList:

For your future reference, the folks who wrote that article work for space.com. This is a "barely there" news organization staffed by mediocre journalists who have a bad habit of getting the details wrong. They also excel at taking press releases literally.

These supposed changes in the Earth's axis of rotation due to earthquakes are miniscule, well below the normal variations. Nearly the same crap was published by various media outlets a few days after the big Sumatra earthquake. I would contend that these stories and the press releases that generated them are in the same category as "ambulance chasing". They're still pulling victims from the rubble in Chile, and people are profiting from death and destruction. They are profiting either directly in terms of the cash that the stories generate or indirectly by putting the media spotlight on some trivial research and the researchers who produce it. Even if they had waited a year or so for the immediate tragedy to be well behind us, this is still little more than a "golly gee whiz" story. They didn't measure anything. It's not an observation of the Earth's rotation. It is merely output from a computer program. It does nothing to enlighten any reader's understanding of geophysics or the natural world generally. Richard Gross, supposedly of NASA JPL, and also the media who fed off this, should be ashamed of themselves. And I can guarantee you this: if this devastating earthquake had happened in Califonia, there would be no gee-whiz stories about such silly trivia.

Please, Peter, do not think that any of the above applies to you. It applies to the people who produced the article, not those who read it.

-FER

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