You
see for four and a half billion years, Earths entire lifetime, our rotation has
been gradually slowing. The speed of average day has grown longer by (between
15 millionths and 25 millionths of a second every year) and you probably think
that would not be large enough to have an effect, and you’d be wrong.
What we have is a constant struggle between the planet's gravity and its
centrifugal force as its angular motion slows. Due to the loss in the Earth
Kinetic Energy from all forms of forces acting on it from the tides, or
galactic space dust, include the solar wind, also the space weather, the
geomagnetic storms, all working to slow it down.
This slow down permits gravity to pull the planet's shape
into a more perfect circle or sphere. Like a daisy chain of one thing causing
another, tremendous stresses within the Earth and in its crust struggle to fit
on the slowly changing mantle. Were the Earth's rotation not slowing, there
would be none of this stress, and the Earth would maintain its girlish curves
throughout time. Its rotation is gradually slowing however, (even taking the
conservation of momentum into consideration), causing its angular momentum to
become progressively weaker. Gravity remains just as strong as ever and
continues to exert the same amount of inward pressure.
This continuous struggle between gravity's centripetal
force and angular momentum's centrifugal force results in tremendous dynamic
stress within the Earth as it attempts to adjust to its trimmer shape. The
Earth finds itself gradually shifting its shape from that of an oblate spheroid
with a bulging equator & flatter pole regions to that of a more perfect
sphere. Throughout the ages, since day one, the Earth has been going through
this constant gradual change.
The surface of the Earth's mantle, especially in the
tropical and subtropical regions of the Earth is becoming smaller while the
pole regions have uplifted and become rounder. The fact that the Earth is
getting rounder, even today, has been confirmed by the satellite
"Lageos" which is being monitored by scientists at the University of
Texas Center for Space Research and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
What it comes down to is an imbalance exists between the
angular momentum and gravity that cause the subduction motions of the
continental crustal plates due to their crusts shifts and crunches as they
continually try to fit what has become a diminishing area of mantle. There are
hundreds of GPS sensors along the Pacific Coast which indicate North America is
moving westward at about 3 inches per year and that the Pacific plate is
subducting under the continent's Pacific coast. Then the subducting ocean plate
is replaced by the central Pacific ridge of mantle oozing up to form a new
ocean bottom.
And guess what, it is this very activity, this
relentless, extremely slow, tremendously powerful, shrinking equatorial region
that then cause earthquakes to occur, volcanoes to erupt and the Earth's vast
mountain ranges to rise.
Dr. Roger Bilham from the University of Colorado has said
that the intense correlation between the changing rotation and the earthquake
and volcanic activity suggest there is going to be an increase in numbers of
intense earthquakes next year. During these periods the Earth's mantle
sticks a little more to the crust, which changes how outer core flows, creating
a mismatch between the speed of the solid crust and the mantle.
Experts warn we 'had it easy this year' with just six
severe earthquakes and claim that next year we could have at least 20 serious
earthquakes, and the most intense ones are expected to occur in tropical
regions, home to around one billion people and plenty of vacationing resorts.
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