After the earthquake in Chile:

Sure enough, water in a monitoring well in Christiansburg, near Virginia Tech, rose at least 4 inches and then dropped about 2 feet as energy waves rippled through the Earth. But Nelms, a groundwater specialist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Richmond, saw something unexpected, too.

“The weird thing about this one was we saw it in wells we normally don’t see response in,” he said, looking over water level charts called hydrographs. “There’s one out in Clarke County that we’ve never seen anything like this in, but there’s a little blip up.”

Business Week quotes Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, as reporting that the whole thing was earthshaking:

“The axis about which the Earth’s mass is balanced should have moved by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters or 3 inches).”

Business Week story via GNC.

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