[time-nuts] Q/noise of Earth as an oscillator

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Sat Jul 23 20:59:12 EDT 2016


tvb at LeapSecond.com said:
> Earth is a very noisy, wandering, drifting, incredibly-expensive-to-measure,
> low-precision (though high-Q) clock.

What is the Q of the Earth?  It might be on one of your web pages, but I 
don't remember seeing it.  Google found a few mentions, but I didn't find a 
number.

I did find an interesting list of damping mechanisms in a geology book.  
Geology-nuts are as nutty as time-nuts.  Many were discussing damping of 
seismic waves rather than rotation.

I've seen mention that the rotation rate of the Earth changed by a few 
microseconds per day as a result of the 2011 earthquake in Japan.  Does that 
show up in any data?  Your recent graph doesn't go back that far and it's got 
a full scale of 2000 microseconds so a few is going to be hard to see.



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