Washington - Japan's recent massive earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, appears to have moved the island by about eight feet (2.4 meters), the US Geological Survey said.

"That's a reasonable number," USGS seismologist Paul Earle told AFP. "Eight feet, that's certainly going to be in the ballpark."

Friday's 8.9 magnitude quake unleashed a terrifying tsunami that engulfed towns and cities on Japan's northeastern coast, destroying everything in its path in what Prime Minister Naoto Kan said was an "unprecedented national disaster."

The quake and its tectonic shift resulted from "thrust faulting" along the boundary of the Pacific and North America plates, according to the USGS.

The Pacific plate pushes under a far western wedge of the North America plate at the rate of about 3.3 inches (83 millimeters) per year, but a colossal earthquake can provide enough of a jolt to dramatically move the plates, with catastrophic consequences.

"With an earthquake this large, you can get these huge ground shifts," Earle said. "On the actual fault you can get 20 meters (65 feet) of relative movement, on the two sides of the fault."

You won't notice it, but the day just got a tiny bit shorter because of Friday's giant earthquake off the coast of Japan.

NASA geophysicist Richard Gross calculated that Earth's rotation sped up by 1.6 microseconds. That's because of the shift in Earth's mass caused by the 8.9-magnitude earthquake. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.

The tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan Friday (March 11) set the Internet abuzz with the idea that the moon, which will be at its fullest of the year on March 19, played a role in the devastating natural disaster.

The seed for the idea was planted by an astrologer, who contended that this large full moon - a so-called "supermoon" - would touch off natural disasters like the Japan earthquake since the moon would make its closest approach to Earth in 18 years. Scientists, however, dismissed the notion entirely and now a top NASA scientist is weighing in.

In a statement released Friday, noted NASA scientist Jim Garvin explains the mechanics behind the moon's phases and the causes of the supermoon. Garvin is the chief scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"'Supermoon' is a situation when the moon is slightly closer to Earth in its orbit than on average, and this effect is most noticeable when it occurs at the same time as a full moon," Garvin wrote in the NASA statement. "So, the moon may seem bigger although the difference in its distance from Earth is only a few percent at such times."

The full moon of March will occur next Saturday on March 19, when the moon will be about 221,567 miles (356,577 kilometers) away from Earth. The average distance between the Earth and the moon is about 238.000 miles (382.900 km).

"It is called a supermoon because this is a very noticeable alignment that at first glance would seem to have an effect," Garvin explained. "The 'super' in supermoon is really just the appearance of being closer, but unless we were measuring the Earth-Moon distance by laser rangefinders (as we do to track the LRO [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter] spacecraft in low lunar orbit and to watch the Earth-Moon distance over years), there is really no difference."

A massive 8.9-magnitude quake hit northeast Japan on Friday, causing dozens of deaths, more than 80 fires, and a 10-meter (33-ft) tsunami along parts of the country's coastline. Homes were swept away and damage is extensive.

Below is a stunning collection of photographs which show some of the devastation in Japan:

NASA satellites have snapped new pictures of the devastating floods and fires in Japan from the deadly earthquake and tsunami that struck the country on Friday (March 11).

Photos from NASA's Earth-watching Terra and Aqua satellites paint a stark picture from above of the damage by the massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake and the subsequent tsunami it spawned. They show Japan's northern region, particularly the city of Sendai - which is visible inundated by floodwaters and fires in the satellite views.

The images were taken today (March 12) - one day after the natural disaster as part of NASA's MODIS Rapid Response system, which uses satellites to provide near real-time images of Earth's landmasses every day. The system can snap photos of Japan twice a day, NASA officials said. [Japan Earthquake and Tsunami in Pictures]

Back in the summer of 1997, I wrote a nine-part investigative report on climate change: Global Warming or Globaloney. It attracted a lot of attention at the time, but given the fact that the nation was being barraged by advocates of the socialist global warming propaganda campaign and their media allies, what I had to say fell mostly on deaf ears.

After all, a lot of the global warming enthusiasts appeared to have all sorts of impressive sounding scientific credentials and who's going to pay attention to a mere journalist with no academic background in climatology who claimed that global warming was a contrived myth and that there was every reason to believe that the current interglacial period of temperate weather has about reached its end.

In that series I wrote that one of the precursors of the onset of an ice age are violent tectonic events such as earthquakes of an ever increasing magnitude as was the quake that just devastated much of the Japanese islands. And despite the alarms issued by Al Gore and his cohorts much of the world has not been warming but instead experiencing some bitterly frigid winters because the polar ice caps have been growing.

The powerful earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami Friday appears to have moved the main island of Japan by 8 feet (2.4 meters) and shifted the Earth on its axis.

"At this point, we know that one GPS station moved (8 feet), and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass," said Kenneth Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Masses of sardines, anchovies, stripped bass and mackerel surged close to shore Friday on one beach in the Mexican resort city, packed so tightly near the surface they looked like an oil slick from above.

Delighted fishermen rushed out in wooden motor boats, abandoning their rods and nets and simply scooping the fish up with buckets.

"It was so much fun. There were about 20 or 30 fishermen and there were people who came with their kids to take advantage of it," fisherman Carlos Morales said.

The fishermen attributed the strange phenomenon to the unusual currents unleashed by tsunami that followed the earthquake in Japan.

Following the massive earthquake in northern Japan, nearly 10,000 people are unaccounted for in the port town of Minamisanriku in Miyagi Prefecture.

The figure is more than half of the town's population of 17,000, Japan Broadcasting Corporation NHK announced on Saturday.

On Friday, an 8.9-magnitude earthquake, off the northeastern coast of Japan's main island, unleashed a 23-foot (7-meter) tsunami and was followed by more than 50 aftershocks for hours.

Radiation was leaking from an unstable nuclear reactor north of Tokyo on Saturday, the Japanese government said, after an explosion blew the roof off the facility following a massive earthquake. The development has led to fears of a disastrous meltdown. Here are comments from experts about what might have happened.

TIMOTHY ABRAM, PROFESSOR OF NUCLEAR FUEL TECHNOLOGY AT BRITAIN'S MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY

"By sampling the air around the station, you'd be able to tell how much radioactivity has been released. The thing they'll be looking for more than anything is whether there's any evidence of the fuel actually degrading," he told Reuters.

"If the fuel is substantially intact, then there'll be a much, much lower release of radioactivity and the explosion that's happened might be just due to a build-up of steam in the reactor circuit.

"The most probable (cause of the explosion) is the coolant, particularly if it's water, can overheat and turn to steam more rapidly than it was designed to cope with."

He said it was unlikely it would develop into anything more serious, but this would depend on the integrity of the fuel, which contains nearly all the radioactivity of the plant. He said he thought it would be "pretty unlikely" that the fuel itself had been significantly damaged.