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The crushing earthquake that struck Japan earlier this class was knock-down enough to slimly alter the pull of sombreness under the affected area , scientists now get hold .
Anything that has mass has a sobriety battleground that attracts objects toward it . The lastingness of this field depends on a body ’s mass . Since the Earth ’s mass is not spread out evenly , this means its gravity theater of operations isstronger in some places and weaker in others .
Themagnitude 9.0 Tohoku - Oki temblorin March was the most powerful earthquake to hit Japan and thefifth - most powerful earthquake ever recorded . To see how the temblor might have deformed the Earth there , scientists used the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment ( GRACE ) satellite to analyze the area ’s gravitation area before and after the quake .
The researcher found the Tohoku - Oki quake reduced the gravity field there by an norm of two- millionths of a gal by slightly thinning the Earth ’s crust . In compare , the strength of the gravitational twist at the Earth ’s aerofoil is , on average , 980 gals . ( The gal , short for Galileo , is a unit of quickening ; one gallon is defined as one centimetre per secondly square . )
" The most important implication of our finding is that the massive Tohoku - Oki temblor fetch significant change to not only the ground but also the hugger-mugger structure of Japan , " researcher Koji Matsuo , a geophysicist at Hokkaido University in Japan , told OurAmazingPlanet .
The GRACE satellites had previously observe gravity change triggered by the order of magnitude 9.1 to 9.3 2004 Sumatra - Andaman quake , the third - most powerful seism ever recorded , and the order of magnitude 8.8 earthquake that reach Chile in 2010 , the eighth - most powerful on record . These reduced the gravity fields in the areas struck in much the same style as the Tohoku - Oki earthquake , since they were all similar type of earthquakes .
The research worker are now interested in seeing if they can observe post - quake gravity theater of operations changes as the crust settles back into position .
Matsuo and his colleague Kosuke Heki detailed their findings online Sept. 22 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters .
