Tsunami in Japan

Mar 13, 2011 Editorial

It was in the middle of Friday afternoon, as workers turned their thoughts to a weekend of R&R that the quake struck. First came the roar and rumble of the temblor, shaking skyscrapers, toppling furniture and buckling highways.
But worst was to come. The U.S. Geological Survey declared the Japanese quake the most severe worldwide since an 8.8-magnitude quake off the coast of Chile a little more than a year ago. It was less powerful than the 9.1-magnitude quake that struck off Northern Sumatra in late 2004. That quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people around the Indian Ocean.
Since the epicentre of the Japanese quake was just 120 km off their coast the Japanese knew a tsunami was in the offing. This is because Japan lies in the “arc of fire”- a subduction zone, where one of the Earth’s tectonic plates is sliding beneath another.
In this case, the Pacific plate is sliding beneath the North American plate at a rate of about three inches a year. It forms a zone of volcanoes and earthquakes. This earthquake occurred at a depth of about 15 miles, which while relatively shallow by global standards, is about normal for quakes in this zone. The actual amount of slip on the fault surface under the ocean may have been as much as 10 metres.
This motion would have resulted in several metres of uplift of the sea floor, displacing huge volumes of water. This forms the giant wave or tsunami that spread out from the epicentre at a speed of 500 miles per hour – the same as a modern jet plane. Because of the location of Japan, these waves are not uncommon: approximately 195 have been recorded. As a matter of fact, they are so characteristic that their name “tsunami” is Japanese.
But the experience of Japan shows that while a country may be prepared for earthquakes, there is precious little it can do about a massive wall of water, thirty feet high, scouring over the land at 500 miles per hour.
At the most, the coastal dwellers had a 15 to -20 minutes warning. Because of the stiff building codes, there was none of the damage from the actual earthquake compared, for instance, to what happened to Port au Prince in Haiti with their much smaller earthquake. Skyscrapers were swaying like trees in a hurricane, making their occupants nauseous, but they did not crumble.
The Japanese public are the most educated in the world about disaster preparedness arising from earthquakes, tsunamis and suchlike: yet the damage from the tsunami has been so devastating.
We are sure, however, that the Japanese will pick up the pieces much faster than the US did after Hurricane Katrina flattened New Orleans. They are a much more cohesive and organised society. The great fear at this point is rather from a different angle: the integrity of several nuclear reactors affected by the earthquake.
Japan is the third-largest nuclear power operator in the world after the United States and France, with 56 reactors. An explosion at a nuclear power plant in northern Japan on Saturday blew the roof off one building, brought down walls and caused a radiation leak of unspecified proportions.
Amid a huge cloud of white-gray smoke from the explosion people in a 12 mile radius have been evacuated. There are fears of a partial core meltdown that occurred at the US Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pa., in 1979.
While the loss of life and property may yet be considerable, many lives were certainly saved by Japan’s extensive disaster preparedness and strict construction codes. While we are not in an earthquake zone, there is Kick ‘em Jenny, the submerged volcano off the coast of Grenada, where the North American tectonic plate is subducting the Caribbean tectonic plate.
Although the dozen or so eruptions since 1939 have not been massive enough to create a tsunami to reach our shores, there is always the possibility. Another reason to move our capital inland?

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Tsunami in Japan

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