Last month’s catastrophic earthquake and tsunami were powerful enough that they actually changed the Earth’s rotation, decreased the length of day, and moved the North Pole. Not much, of course, but enough that scientists can actually measure the effect. Scientists from NASA found that the length of the day shortened by 2.68 microseconds, and the North Pole shifted by 2.5 centimetres (1 inch). The Sumatran earthquake registered as a 9 on the Richter scale, making it the 4th largest earthquake measured in 100 years.