[TJKong]

I saw this article today. I had no idea this happened, and am amazed with the accuracy of the measurements. I wonder if this effects atomic clocks?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aLAUn4Gy92ss

 

[Path11]

It is amazing that they can model the earth to that level of detail! It wouldn't affect the accuracy of the cesium clocks themselves, more likely what would happen is that UTC would be adjusted as needed (see wikipedia, usno.navy.mil, etc. for UTC or Coordinated Universal Time for nauseatingly detailed description - leap seconds are periodically added to account for the slowing rotation of the earth). This serves as the basis for time standards such as the USNO and Internet Time, so it gets propagated out to the net timer servers and radio time beacons and thus to all the Casio / Citizen / etc. radio controlled watches / clocks.

 

[v76]

I saw this article today. I had no idea this happened, and am amazed with the accuracy of the measurements. I wonder if this effects atomic clocks?

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aLAUn4Gy92ss

Wouldn't have really thought of it that way, but after reading that article and thinking about it, it does make a lot of sense. Nice one there, thanks!

 

[TNT13]

IIRC a second is now defined as some odd number of vibrations of a cesium atom (too lazy to google right now). So it shouldn't affect atomic clocks. It does affect the length of a year though. So things that are defined by planetary motion will be affected, while Olympic events should not.

 

[camb66]

Yes it is true, Physical Geography and Earth Science is my field and i was certainly aware of the 2004 Boxing Day quake and its impact on the time. Thanks for the link - very interesting.