Sunday’s earthquake was an “earthquake” in its real sense. It literally shook the whole of earth! The quake that measured 9.0 on the Richter scale caused the earth to wobble around its axis of rotation in its orbit.
The US geological survey expert, Ken Hudnut, said that they can detect very slight motions of the earth and he believes that the earth wobbled in its orbit when the earthquake occurred due the massive amount of energy exerted and the sudden shift in mass.
Hudnut also said that based on seismic modeling, some of the smaller islands off the southwest coast of Sumatra may have moved to the southwest by about 20 meters. It is estimated that the northwestern tip of the Indonesian territory of Sumatra might have shifted to the southwest by around 36 meters.
Stuart Sipkin, of the USGS National Earthquake Information Center in Golden Colorado disagrees with Hudnut. Sipkin feels that since the Indian plate dived below the Burma plate, the motion to the islands would have been vertical, not horizontal. It is more likely that the islands off Sumatra had risen higher out of the sea than they had moved laterally.
Whatever either researchers say, one thing is certain that the quake has changed the face of earth.
