Northern Japanese Earthquake & Tsunami
The BBC reports that a Tsunami hits Japan after massive quake
The most powerful earthquake to hit Japan since records began has struck the country’s north-east and triggered a devastating tsunami.
Japanese TV showed cars, ships and buildings swept away by a vast wall of water after the 8.9-magnitude quake.
A state of emergency has been declared at a nuclear power plant but officials said there were no radiation leaks.
At least 60 people have been killed by the quake, which struck about 400km (250 miles) north-east of Tokyo.
The death toll is expected to rise significantly.
Some reports quote Japanese police as saying 200 to 300 bodies have been found in the port city of Sendai.
There is a passenger train that ran along the coast missing, so the death toll will definitely be higher. Shemya in the Aleutians and Hawaii have already detected the Tsunami, which registered at better than 5 feet at Midway.
I can’t even imagine the force of an 8.9 earthquake. They are having aftershocks above 7.
The ABC has a graphic on Earthquake comparisons. This one fits between Chile and Sumatra. It is at the convergence of the North American, Eurasian, Pacific, and Filipino plates.
5 comments
There’s two nuclear power plants with a declared state of emergency now and one has released some radioactive gas. We got the tsunami here but it was more a swell, unless you happened to be in one of the coves that concentrate the force of oncoming swells, like the morons were who gathered on the beach to watch the tsumani and got washed out to sea for their trouble. Incidentally, in a meeting this afternoon I was told that some of the security camera footage from one of the stricken nuclear plants was likely courtesy of a product I worked on. Cool :). Not so cool is that our hardware doesn’t work so well once melted into a radioactive lump, which seems like far too much a possibility right now :(.
Earthquakes scare me. You can prepare for a hurricane — you can stock up on supplies, you can tape or plywood your windows, you can head out for the interior where it’ll just be a strong gale. You know a hurricane’s coming. An earthquake, on the other hand… eep! I’m just glad that I’m 80 feet above sea level now, rather than below sea level like I was for the prior six years (protected by a leaky dike built to protect salt evaporation ponds, not people — eek!), because it should at least mean I won’t drown if an earthquake hits here. Though given the fact that my house was built in 1961 and is about as earthquake-proof as an eggshell, as vs. my below-sea-level-apartment which was built to withstand earthquakes, I don’t know how good that should make me feel :(.
My boss, who is Japanese, is going to try to contact our people in Japan this evening. Immediately after the earthquake and tsunami was of course hopeless and he didn’t even try. Hopefully they’re all okay, just getting around by bicycle at the moment because the trains are stopped and the streets are closed off.
– Badtux the Shaky Penguin
The past several years certainly has had some tragedies of almost biblical proportions. What’s next – raining frogs?
If this all weren’t enough, now there are several nuclear power reactors in serious trouble. One article cites:
authorities detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1’s control room.
Some of the major nuclear groups in this country are downplaying the seriousness of this, and I’m really not knowledgeable enough to have an educated opinion. It’s just another unknown to add to it all.
My hopes and fervent best wishes to the people of Japan and other affected areas.
One of Stella’s classmates in an online professional course lives near Tokyo. Eventually she managed to get to a university with working connections and check in; thank Dog she and her family are OK (for a certain stretched definition of “OK”). Ironically, other members of the family were in the air in the U.S. with an ultimate destination of Tokyo, but they were turned back in Denver.
I suppose I agree with BadTux to a point, but bad hurricanes are hardly a piece of cake. I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes, of which two were bad enough to really scare me. I believe storm surges induce the same kind of fear as tsunamis, that feeling of “here comes water and there’s no avoiding it.” For the past 30 years I’ve chosen places to live based in part on maps of hypothetical storm surge areas; so far I’ve been lucky.
…with all the dramatic video capture of this disaster, I couldn’t help but point out tonight to Mrs. Jack K that someday (perhaps someday soon) the cable news networks would be showing the same sort of terrifying videos of the PacNW. The Cascadia subduction zone is just offshore along the upper left-hand corner of the map (extending from Vancouver Island to Cape Mendocino) and has – according to geologists, anthropologists, and historians – produced any number of earthquakes just like this one in the past. The periodicity is said to be appro.ximately500 years (a rough average, admittedly, with the span being 300 to 900 years) and the last “Big One” that has estimated to be of similar intensity to last night’s event is documented as happening on the evening of Jan. 26, 1700. It generated an estimated 33-foot tsunami along the Washington coast and 6 to 10-foot surges along the very same eastern coastline of Honshu, Japan that was devastated last night (it has been called the “orphan tsunami” because it came without the warning offered by an accompanying earthquake)…
In my innocent childhood, when I used to go on trips from central Idaho to the southern Washington coast with family and wonder what was up with all those dead trees jutting out of coastal stream banks many miles inland from our destination of the ocean beaches, I thought that life and the world as I understood it would extend out beyond forever. I’ve learned in the intervening four decades what those dead stream bank logs are all about and what the physical processes that control our planet think about my – or any other person’s – presence on the face of it. Turns out the answer is…”nothing”. In my line of work, I can sit for as long as is humanly possible in meetings discussing various alternative plans to modify the vegetation of the surrounding mountains to achieve some sort of human interpretation of how nature should work, but at the bottom line it turns out it doesn’t matter. Science says that it appears that there is a very likely anthropomorphic influence on climate with more or less rain or snow or more or less cyclonic events in various locations, but volcanic eruptions (which I’ve seen one more than enough of, thank you very much, given where I live) and earthquakes and tsunamis are just simply what they are and happen without regard to human influence or whatever pitiful sense of existence we may otherwise think we are entitled to on the surface of this volatile planet. The only good news for me is that Central Orygun is is separated by a hundred miles and two mountain ranges from the coast, so the tsunami thing isn’t a problem. But that is small comfort, and tonight my heart and prayers go out to those who are suffering and struggling…
Just like hurricanes, the water is the worst part. Whether you call it a storm surge or a tsunami, when a 30-foot wall of water comes ashore, not much can stop it, but you do get a much longer warning period with hurricanes than earthquakes.
I was surprised that the USGS and other seismologists were actively watching the area because they had predicted that the current activity, including a 7.1 not long ago, were foreshocks of an approaching major quake. They are getting much better in their ability to predict earthquakes than just a decade ago.
It would appear that it was the tsunami that created the emergency at the two plants, not the earthquake. I’m guessing that the water disabled the diesel generators. I would think that they are going to use heavy-lift helicopters to bring in new and working units to get the cooling working.
In addition to everything else, they are going to have hydrogen problems if they don’t get those units cooled down quickly. At some point they will have to vent to reduce the pressure in the containment buildings, and that will definitely spread the radiation.
As Jack says, about all we can do is send good thoughts their way.