7.9 and 8.8 Earthquakes in Japan

yikes

i remember it, it was awful

all my best china

yeah it's not really "an earthquake" any more at that point, it's more like being above an underground nuclear test

Total destruction – Everything is destroyed. Lines of sight and level distorted. Objects thrown into the air. The ground moves in waves or ripples. Large amounts of rock move position. Landscape altered, or levelled by several meters. In some cases, even the routes of rivers are changed.

except it'd be like distributing 300 of the biggest bombs ever made and setting that off

that's a 10 i'm talking about, not a 12.5!

12.5 would be two million of the biggest nukes

getting into lensman territory

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/261550/earthquake-felt-in-visayas

japan on tsunami watch

http://www.jma.go.jp/jp/tsunami/

gah

it's like 10:30pm in japan right now and all

(i am not there but i know where my evacuation point would be if i was)

tsunami warning cancelled everywhere except indonesia, philippines, belau

one of my v good friends is meant to be leaving for java tomorrow - super glad he hasn't left yet tbh.

i feel like i have turned into one of those medieval buddhist texts, all "never make attachments to other humans as your life will never be free from worry"

in suburban ishinomaki by the beach there were these signposts, whose tops were bent at a 45 degree angle, that said "tsunami evacuation point [blah blah high school] 300m ahead" and it was ironic because the signposts are now bent at a 45 degree angle and also because [blah blah high school] is now heavily damaged and mostly gutted and its schoolyard used as a tip for debris.

by 'ironic' i mostly mean 'upsetting'.

Masao Yoshida, Nuclear Engineer and Chief at Fukushima Plant, Dies at 58

TOKYO — Masao Yoshida, a nuclear engineer who took charge of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant two years ago as multiple reactors spiraled out of control after a tsunami, but who ultimately failed to prevent the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, died here on Tuesday. He was 58.

The cause was cancer, said the Fukushima plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power.

ugh, grim.

The irony has not escaped netizens, some of whom wonder whether his diagnosis was connected to radiation exposure. The plant’s operator, Tepco, insists it was not. Yoshida left his post in December 2011 after fighting a nine-month battle to stop Fukushima’s reactors from overheating, and a week later Tepco disclosed his diagnosis.

Meanwhile: Fukushima nuclear leaks alarm Japan regulator - Power station continuing to contaminate water and soil two years after disaster, watchdog says.

Japanese Government intervenes in TEPCO cleanup, proposes $400 Million Dollar Fukushima Underground "Ice Wall":

http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2021561491_japannukexml.html

25 minute video of the tsunami from early dread/alarms to devastation. Hadn't seen this one yet...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gh3JrdL-Zg

That one's insane.

A glitch from an underwater earthquake gauge near Mie Prefecture in Japan apparently resulted in nearly every single Japanese cellphone to sound it's built in Earthquake alarm just over a week ago, freaking the whole nation out for a few mins.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/08/08/national/agency-quake-alert-was-false-alarm/#.Ug425mT70Xp

Yack. 7.3 in the Fukushima region half an hour ago.

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usc000kn4n#summary

Good lord.

Friend on FB:

I felt it...I'm in Kawasaki, just south of Tokyo. I thought I heard drums playing but it was just stuff in the house rattling back and forth. This site seems to say that there's only a marine threat from a possible small tsunami (no land damage expected). There's an advisory (yellow), but not a warning (red).
http://www.jma.go.jp/en/tsunami/
Hoping for no damage!
There's also a typhoon expected tomorrow, the rain portion of which seems to be already here - oy vey!

Full text of this article is quoted below:

The Tokyo Electric Power Corp. says Unit 1 at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant did, in fact, meltdown during the 2011 accident.

TEPCO released results from a three-day study in February of the Unit 1 reactor building jointly with the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning. The two companies collected data until March 10. The project used cosmic rays to inspect the interior of the building. By analyzing the flow of muons, which are subatomic particles generated when cosmic rays collide with the atmosphere, TEPCO was able to generate X-ray like images of the interior of the reactor. Muons can pass through concrete and iron, but they are blocked and change direction when they hit high-density substances such as plutonium and uranium, creating a “shadow.”

TEPCO said the fuel had melted because there were no shadows around the reactor’s core, and the fuel had likely melted and fallen to the bottom of the building into a containment vessel. The operator also said there was no accumulation of water in the core of the reactor pressure vessel.

TEPCO said the results confirmed previous assumptions of a meltdown. The utility plans to continue measurement until it gains enough data to conduct a statistical analysis, and said the data gained will help it work out a plan to remove the debris, most likely by robots due to the high amounts of radiation in the reactor.

A friend in Japan is worrying over this story, apparently the same thing happened 5 days before the 2011 quake, same incident, same beach. Most likely there's nothing in it of course, kinda weird though.

http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20150410_35.htmld.

Can't access link?

Gah, sorry.

http://www.japancrush.com/2015/pictures/150-dolphins-wash-ashore-in-ibaraki-prompts-earthquake-panic.html

not strange for traumatized people to panic at anything that pulls them back into their trauma

http://www.podniesinski.pl/portal/fukushima/

6.5 and 7.0 earthquakes just southwest of Japan

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11600771

Japan's prime minister at the time of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami has revealed the country came within a "paper-thin margin" of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people.

In an interview to mark the fifth anniversary of the disaster, Naoto Kan described the panic and disarray at the highest levels of the Japanese Government as it fought to control multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station.

He said he considered evacuating Tokyo and all other areas within 250km of the plant, and declaring martial law. "The future existence of Japan as a whole was at stake," he said. "Something on that scale, an evacuation of 50 million, it would have been like a losing a huge war."

Kan admitted he was frightened and said he got "no clear information" out of Tepco, the plant's operator.

He was "very shocked" by the performance of Nobuaki Terasaka, his government's nuclear safety adviser.

"We asked him, 'Do you know anything about nuclear issues?'

"And he said, 'No, I majored in economics'."

human civilization
c.8000 BCE - c.2050 CE
"no, i majored in economics"

lol

Shaken Beliefs: Seismic Lessons from Japan’s Tohoku Earthquake

"We asked him, 'Do you know anything about nuclear issues?'

"And he said, 'No, I majored in economics'."

This is fucking frightening!

http://www.jma.go.jp/en/tsunami/focus_2_03_20161122060214.html

Ugh

lengthy shaking through the morning in tokyo.

i was woken up yesterday morning by an earthquake off ibaraki and exactly one hour earlier this morning, max intensity 3 in tokyo, according to my phone. i always thought especially before moving to the city that the tohoku region was, like, far away from tokyo but it's like, the southeastern boundaries of tohoku, the fukushima coast, it's like a two and a half hour drive, the distance from seattle to vancouver and the northernmost commuter suburbs of tokyo are right up there. i'm moving at the end of the month to a sturdier highrise on higher land which was a selling point in the real estate company's pitch but right now i live in a pre-1982 building that seems to amplify the shakes of even modest quakes and i can feel the rumble of the nearby arakawa streetcar line and the neighborhood is 2.5 meters above sea level. but i mean apart from the potential that this building could collapse and the roof could slip in onto my soft body right before i fall three stories into a twisted pile of rebar and concrete or that fire could sweep through the closely packed streets of arakawa ward or the low lying lands could be inundated, it's interesting to feel the rhythmic judder of the earth, a strong shake and then a pulsing slow shake, slow sometimes like this morning when the house seemed to stay slowly shaking for at least thirty seconds after the first rough wave or yesterday morning when it was like a shockwave hitting, a sudden shake and pause pause another weaker shake.

It's nice to realize you'll live to see another day, isn't it.

Was watching the 'live' news feed video, on that link above, for an hour before I realised it was a recording.

Reiyūkai Shakaden Temple, Tokyo — Takenaka Corp., 1975

The spaceship-like steel and black granite structure, inspired by the mysterious architecture of Seiichi Shirai, houses a reservoir with 400 tonnes of drinking water, in the event that Tokyo is struck by a major disaster. pic.twitter.com/BzExkM0sbX

— Irène DB (@UrbanFoxxxx) July 11, 2019

love this steel and granite water tank that looks like a predator space ship or base or something.

i've been in there before, and i know it's supposed to be open to everyone (run by some new religious buddhist sect i assume is supported by all the aging former 60s radicals millionaires that live around there and which i learn from wikipedia also counts former tokyo governor and xenophobic blowhard ishihara as a devotee) but unwelcoming, a long climb up massive stairs, then it's too dark to see anything inside. the intersection there (if you turned left from the shakaden entrance, or walked up from kamiyacho) is interesting, the tokyo tower looming overhead, and whether or not seiichi shirai inspired the shakaden, there is an actual seiichi shirai building right there: the NOA building.

no picture seems to capture the rough beauty/strangeness of it:

https://shoto-museum.jp/wp-content/themes/shoto_museum/images/architecture_photo09.jpg

Interesting. I’m staying right by there for a couple of months later this year.

10 years ago today (officially 9.1 on the Richter scale, lasting 6 minutes).

14,308 people drowned (including 1 man in Indonesia and 1 man in Oregon!)
19,575 total dead including after-effects

The earthquake triggered powerful tsunami waves that reached heights of up to 125 ft in Miyako in Tōhoku's Iwate Prefecture, causing whitewater to surge up to 6 miles inland. Residents of Sendai had only eight to ten minutes of warning, and more than a hundred evacuation sites were washed away.

The tsunami broke icebergs off the Sulzberger Ice Shelf in Antarctica, ~8k miles away.

The earth's axis shifted between 10-25cm.

Three level 7 meltdowns occured at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex.

Within a year objects such as a soccer ball and a motorcycle would wash ashore in western Canada, over four thousand miles after drifting across the Pacific.