Planetary Rumblings

If you'd read or heard that the Chilean earthquake had knocked the earth slightly off of it's axis, thereby shortening our day by 1.26 milliseconds, fear not. It turns out that, in the long run, the planet has a series of coping mechanisms designed to put everything right again. How interesting would it be to work some of those properties into a science fiction story wherein a planet's changing orbital patterns can be used in some fashion to thwart the bad guys? Or the good guys, depending on your bent.