Friday 11 March 2011

JAPAN’S EARTHQUAKE

BBC News

QUAKE WAS BIG EVEN FOR JAPAN

Jonathan Amos

BBC News, March 11, 2011

Another day, another earthquake. Except the Magnitude 8.9 tremor off the coast of Honshu, Japan, will be a standout event for 2011.

Perhaps not in terms of the eventual death toll it brings, but certainly in scale.

There are usually only one or two quakes of this size every year. And even for a country such as Japan, which is very familiar with seismic hazards, this is extraordinary.

The history books show there have been seven quakes rated at 8.0 or greater since 1891 in Japan. And with big tremors come big aftershocks.

Following the initial 8.9 event at 1446 local time (0546 GMT), a sequence of major tremors was initiated - six of them within an hour-and-a-quarter that were all bigger than or all equal to last month's quake in Christchurch, NZ (6.3). The largest of the aftershocks was a 7.1.

Some of the early video footage to emerge from Japan was dramatic - city workers hanging on to their desks as everything rocked around them and buildings on fire being swept across farmland as tsunami waters washed inland.

(...) [artículo aquí]

1 comment:

Pike riddle said...

The only effective way of detecting people under the rubble - it's infrared camera