A diagram shows the locations of multiple earthquakes around Chile.
space-coma-cluster.jpg
A yellow-bellied three-toed skink.
The crop circles of Santa Teresinha, Brazil, are seen in an undated photograph.
A supermassive black hole.
a tube-nosed fruit bat found in Papua New Guinea.
Mount Ararat.
an anglerfish from a new study of fish species new to Greenland.
Sections of the Dead Sea scrolls.
A file picture of a pink handfish in Australia, now recognized as a new species.
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10. Quake Altered Axis, Changed Time

February's Chile earthquake was so powerful that it likely shifted an Earth axis and shortened the length of a day—a NASA revelation that helped make this story National Geographic News's tenth most visited of 2010.

By speeding up Earth's rotation, the magnitude 8.8 earthquake—the fifth strongest ever recorded, according to the USGS—should have shortened an Earth day by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to new computer-model calculations by geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Full story >>

Image courtesy NASA Earth Observatory

Top Ten Discoveries of 2010: Nat Geo News's Most Popular

A time-bending earthquake, a fish with "hands," and "Yoda bat" are among National Geographic News's most visited coverage of 2010 discoveries.

December 01, 2010

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