Earthquake shakes entire planet

According to NASA scientists, Chile's magnitude 8.8 earthquake, the seventh most powerful in recorded history, has shortened the day by 1.26 microseconds and shifted the Earth's axis of rotation by 3 inches. Lasting a mere 3 minutes, the Chilean earthquake killed approximately 700 people and resulted in damages of over $8 billion.

This is not Chile's first brush with earthquakes. Situated next to the fault line between the Nazca and South American plates, Chile was severely damaged by a magnitude 9.5 earthquake. After 6,000 deaths and $800 million in damages in 1960, Chile drastically improved building codes and emergency response capabilities.

The result of an energy release from the Earth's crust, earthquakes can be caused by plate movements, volcanic eruptions and weapon testing. The Chilean earthquake was caused by the convergence of the Nazca plate and the South American plate. According to NASA geophysicist Richard Gross, the shift in the tectonic plates subtlety altered the mass distribution of the Earth. Both the location and the angle of the earthquake played a large role in the planetary shift.

This geological process is likened to that of a spinning ice skater. "When an ice skater spins on the ice spins pretty quickly, but that rotation actually increases as the ice skater pulls their mass in tighter and tighter," said Wendy Ackerman of the Maryland Science Center.

All large geological events can potentially change the rotation of the Earth. "Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth's rotation," said Benjamin Fong Chao of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in a CNN interview.

Currently, scientists cannot accurately predict earthquakes in the short term. According to the United States Geological Survey, scientists can only calculate the possibilities of potential quakes in the long term.

Experts say there are five areas located near dangerous earthquake zones. The Pacific Northwest, California, the Eastern seaboard, Alaska and even the Midwest are close to active faults. While there is less earthquake activity around the Eastern Seaboard than California, buildings are structurally weaker.

"There's clearly much less activity on the Eastern Seaboard than in California or the Pacific Northwest, but the flip side of that is that the building codes aren't of the same standard," said Geoffrey Reyes, a seismologist at Columbia University.

"So even modest-sized earthquakes close to populated areas could be much more destructive. There are a lot of emergency preparedness groups in California, a lot of work on building codes and designs, but building to earthquake codes is expensive, and in the east there are older buildings built before people thought very hard about earthquakes. Buildings cause 80 percent of deaths in earthquakes from structure collapse."

So far this year, there have been eight major earthquakes. The most recent struck Taiwan last week. While the recent spate of earthquakes has captivated the world's attention, the number of earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 and greater have actually decreased in recent years.