Those included in the study were Jean Dickey and Steven Marcus from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, along with Olivier de Viron, from the Universite Paris Diderot and Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France. It is well known that an Earth day consists of 24 hours, which is the time it takes for the Earth to make one full rotation. Over a year's time, seasonal changes occur due to energy exchanges between fluid motions of the Earth's atmosphere, the oceans and solid Earth itself, which changes the length of a day by about 1 millisecond. In addition, the length of a day on Earth can vary over longer timescales such as interannual timescales (two to 10 years) or decadal timescales (10 years).
But Earth’s oceans or motions of its atmosphere cannot explain the variances in the length of day over longer timescales. Instead, longer fluctuations are explained by the flow of liquid iron within Earth's outer core, which interacts with the mantle to determine Earth's rotation. This is also where the Earth's magnetic field originates, and because researchers cannot observe the flows of liquid iron directly, the magnetic field is observed at the surface.
Studies have shown that this liquid iron "oscillates in waves of motion that last for decades," and have timescales that resemble long fluctuations in Earth's day length. At the same time, other studies have shown that long variations in Earth's day length are closely related to fluctuations in Earth's average surface air temperature. Read More
Tsunami Was More Than 77 Feet High At Its Peak "A tsunami wave that hit a coastal city in Iwate Prefecture after the March 11 massive earthquake is estimated to have reached 23.6 meters in height, a government-commissioned field survey by the Port and Airport Research Institute showed Wednesday," Kyodo News reports.That's 77 feet, 5 inches. Or, about the height of a six- or seven-story building...
