Decadal correlation between crustal deformation and variation in length of day of the Earth

Abstract

Recently, in comparing with Earth rotation data, we found some exciting correlation phenomena between length-of-day (LOD) and crustal deformations as well as stress observations in China, the correlation appears most typically on decade time scales and seems to be direction-dependent. As LOD variation induced stress and deformation is far less than the observed ones, we infer that decade variations in crustal deformation and stress are very possibly attributed to the core-mantle coupling process, just like LOD decade variations are attributed to core-mantle coupling. More detailed and extended investigations are going on, and we believe that the similar correlation phenomena should also exist in other part of the world. The LOD-correlated crustal deformations are expected to provide a better constraint on verifying the real core-mantle coupling mechanism, topographic, electromagnetic or gravitational coupling.