Japan Earthquakes

Rosco..Jones

Member
Messages
363
I just found this yesterday.
The two videos below show 2011 earthquakes in Japan and the world as a time lapse records.
They also include various types of statistical charts.
Since the big earthquake/sunami, the frequency and severity of Japan quakes has maintained a much higher level than normal. It appears there is a gradual decline taking place, but things are definitely not normal.

Ren, I feel for you. Much of the live chat taking place was regarding both quakes and the reactor situation. Many people say they are leaving Japan. Any updates on your staus and/or comments?



 

Opmmur

Time Travel Professor
Messages
5,049
25 million tons of tsunami debris floating toward US shores

Written By Jeremy A. Kaplan
Published February 15, 2012
FoxNews.com
  • Day%2020.JPG

    A massive floating patch of debris following the March 11, 2011, tsunami that struck Japan is floating across the Pacific Ocean, and should begin piling up on U.S. shores in increasing amounts. (International Pacific Research Center)
  • Day%20200.JPG

    A massive floating patch of debris following the March 11, 2011, tsunami that struck Japan is floating across the Pacific Ocean, and should begin piling up on U.S. shores in increasing amounts. (International Pacific Research Center)
  • Day%20375.JPG

    A massive floating patch of debris following the March 11, 2011, tsunami that struck Japan is floating across the Pacific Ocean, and should begin piling up on U.S. shores in increasing amounts. (International Pacific Research Center)
  • Day%20725.JPG

    A massive floating patch of debris following the March 11, 2011, tsunami that struck Japan is floating across the Pacific Ocean, and should begin piling up on U.S. shores in increasing amounts. (International Pacific Research Center)
  • Day%20995.JPG

    A massive floating patch of debris following the March 11, 2011, tsunami that struck Japan is floating across the Pacific Ocean, and should begin piling up on U.S. shores in increasing amounts. (International Pacific Research Center)
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Wrecked cars, portions of homes, boats, furniture and more -- all swept up by the destructive, magnitude 9.0 earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan 11 months ago -- are on a slow-motion collision course with California.

But no one's tracking the debris, Jim Churnside, a physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency's (NOAA) Marine Debris Program, told FoxNews.com.

"It would be really nice, but it’s really difficult," Churnside expained.

The wreckage from the March 11, 2011, disaster could include virtually anything that floats, according to oceanographer and beachcomber Curtis Ebbesmeyer -- and that includes portions of houses, boats, ships, furniture, cars and even human remains.
I would not be surprised to see some fishing vessels by April.​
- oceanographer and beachcomber Curtis Ebbesmeyer

Independent models constructed by the NOAA and the University of Hawaii show a vast, loose debris field drifting inexorably toward Hawaii, California and Washington -- the first fishing buoys reached the West Coast in mid December, Ebbesmeyer wrote in his "Beachcombers Alert" newsletter. The flotsam is expected to increase, with the bulk of the debris hitting some time in 2014.

"I would not be surprised to see some fishing vessels by April, and the main mass of debris start arriving a year from this March," Ebbesmeyer told FoxNews.com.

Beyond that, it's hard to say exactly how big the debris is -- or even where the majority of it is.
"After the tsunami, the debris was closely clumped together," Churnside told FoxNews.com. "After storms and over time, those [clumps] kind of get broken up. I don’t think there’s going to be much that’s visible from satellites right now."

High resolution satellite cameras could pick up the scattered remains -- the houses and cars, the ruined fishing boats and oil drums. But setting such a camera to exhaustively scan the vastness of the Pacific Ocean would be tedious and expensive, he noted.
"There’s no good efficient way to do it," Churnside said, "just because it’s spread out by now over such a huge area."

Floating debris travels at about 7 mph, Ebbesmeyer said, but it can move as much as 20 mph if it has a large area exposed to the wind, according to a report in the Associated Press. That said, Churnside expects models of the debris path from last summer are probably accurate.
The debris is not expected to be radioactive. Carey Morishige, the Pacific Islands Regional Coordinator for the NOAA Marine Debris Program, told science blog Earthsky.org that radioactivity is probably not an issue, since the tsunami carried most of the debris seaward before the failure of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor.

"All debris should be treated with a great reverence and respect," Ebbesmeyer told the AP.
Churnside plans to revisit his models of the enormous debris field next month, one year after the devasting event.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/02/15/25-million-tons-tsunami-debris-floating-toward-us-shores/#ixzz1mcexjSvy
 

Opmmur

Time Travel Professor
Messages
5,049
From Earth Changes Media
Breaking News
Tsunami Forecasting: The Next Wave
By Earth Changes Media
Mar 13, 2012 - 2:13:52 PM


A year after the March 2011 devastating Japan tsunami, scientists and emergency managers are still struggling to improve their tsunami detection and warning systems before the ocean strikes again. Japan will soon start to install a 32.4-billion (US$402-million) system of ocean-bottom sensors to provide advanced warnings of tsunamis heading towards the coast. And the United States is considering moving some of its deep-ocean warning buoys off the Pacific Northwest coastline closer to the Cascadia subduction zone, where a mammoth quake is expected, perhaps within the next few decades.


japan_tsunami_dart-map_med.jpg


As soon as the shaking died down on 11 March last year, Ken-Ichi Sato stumbled back to his office and pressed the alarm button, triggering sirens throughout the city of Kesennuma in northeastern Japan. As the emergency manager of the coastal community, Sato had to alert the 64,000 people there that a tsunami might be coming.

A minute later, that threat became more real when Sato received word from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) that the quake was large - magnitude 7.9 - and located off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture, where Kesennuma is located, in the Tohoku region. Residents there should brace for a 6-metre tsunami, warned the agency, and the neighbouring Iwate and Fukushima prefectures should prepare for waves half that height. Sato immediately issued an evacuation warning over the city's loudspeakers.

But when the tsunami hit around half an hour later, it dwarfed the original JMA estimates. The water surging into Kesennuma reached 9 metres high, and the waves battering other coastal sites topped 20 metres, pouring over the sea walls and barriers that buttress much of the Tohoku coastline. Some 15,000 people died as a result of the tsunami - some of whom had reportedly not fled to higher ground because the projected wave heights had made them think they were safe. In Kesennuma alone, 1,031 people died and hundreds are missing.

Sato thinks that the toll might have been lower had he learned the true size of the tsunami earlier. "We could have raised the intensity levels of the alerts," he says. "We could have made sure that people got to a high-enough place."

A year later, scientists and emergency managers are still struggling to improve their tsunami detection and warning systems before the ocean strikes again. Japan will soon start to install a 32.4-billion (US$402-million) system of ocean-bottom sensors to provide advanced warnings of tsunamis heading towards the coast. And the United States is considering moving some of its deep-ocean warning buoys off the Pacific Northwest coastline closer to the Cascadia subduction zone, where a mammoth quake is expected, perhaps within the next few decades.
The efforts are an extension of advances made since 2004, when a tsunami caused by an earthquake off the coast of Sumatra killed more than 230,000 people. The disaster raised awareness of tsunamis and prompted nations to pump money into research and equipment. As a result, emergency managers can now effectively forecast how tsunamis will cross ocean basins and hit coastlines thousands of kilometres from a quake's source.

The next, more difficult, goal is to improve warnings for close-in regions, which may only have minutes to react. "Historically, maybe 95% of tsunami deaths are from local or regional tsunamis," says Laura Kong, director of the International Tsunami Information Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. "How do the United States and the global community address that with the resources we have?"

Japan intends to meet that challenge with its new sensor network, which is designed to keep tabs on the eastern coastline (see 'Safety net'). Operated by the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention (NIED) in Tsukuba, the system will consist of 154 sea-floor observatories, each of which contains a seismometer and a water-pressure gauge that can sense the passage of a tsunami, according to Toshihiko Kanazawa, head of the team developing the network. Fibre-optic cables will connect the units in six long loops that each reach the coast at two widely separated locations. According to the NIED, that design will keep the system online even if tsunamis damage a land station or destroy a cable, as happened last March to some sea-floor sensors stationed off the Tohoku coast. The plan is to finish the new network by the end of March 2015.

A large cabled network is already in place in the Nankai trough area south of Tokyo, where a large earthquake is expected in the coming decades (see Nature 476, 391-392; 2011). The system is "field-proven", says Kanazawa. "Its simplicity is suitable for tsunami warning use."
The NIED sensors will sit between the coastline and the earthquake source - the offshore trench where the Pacific plate dives beneath the plate carrying northern Japan. When the Pacific plate jerks forward, the edge of the overlying plate springs up and displaces a huge volume of water, triggering a tsunami. The waves race through the deep water of the open ocean at speeds of roughly 700 kilometres per hour. They alter the sea level by only a metre or two at most as they travel far from the source. But when they hit shallow water, the waves slow down to less than one-twentieth of their former speed and rear up, creating giant surges that sweep ashore. When the NIED network is in place, it will detect the pressure change caused by the tsunami as it travels from the deep ocean over the continental shelf, providing between 5 and 20 minutes of warning for people on the shore.

As a complement to that system, the JMA plans to install three sea-floor sensors on the opposite side of the subduction zone, to catch tsunamis as they speed through the open ocean. Instead of transmitting data through a cable, these sensors will send acoustic signals to nearby buoys that then relay the information up to geostationary satellites. The buoys can be installed faster than the cabled network and will be put in place this year, says Kanazawa.

They will be part of an existing network of buoys known as DART, for Deep-Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis. The United States has 40 such buoys stationed around the Pacific and Atlantic, and other nations have purchased 14 buoys, which are positioned at sites in the Pacific and Indian oceans, with almost all of the data shared internationally.

The impetus to develop the DART system came in part from an expensive false alarm, recalls Eddie Bernard, who designed the system and retired as head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle, Washington, in 2010. When a magnitude-8.0 quake struck the Aleutian Islands in 1986, Hawaii evacuated its beaches and other low-lying coastal areas at a cost of some $40 million, including lost revenue. But when the tsunami washed ashore, it was only about 15 centimetres high. The civil-defence leader called up Bernard, who was head of a lab doing tsunami research, and said: "Why can't you do better?"
The programme got a boost when a 1992 earthquake off the coast of northern California raised concern that the Cascadian subduction zone might let loose with a giant earthquake and trigger a devastating tsunami. So in 1997, Congress provided funds for a tsunami mitigation programme, and Bernard finished his long-term project to develop deep-ocean tsunami sensors.

He and others originally thought of DART buoys as sentinels for the entire ocean, watching for tsunamis from distant earthquakes - the type that usually threaten Hawaii. The buoys had accordingly been stationed far out to sea, both to catch the largest number of tsunamis and because researchers worried that if the sensors were close to the source of an earthquake, the seismic vibrations would drown out any tsunami signal.
But the Tohoku quake changed that thinking. At a meeting in January at the PMEL, Japanese and US scientists discussed ways to filter out the seismic vibrations from the sensor data, which would mean that the sensors could be deployed much closer to faults, says Vasily Titov, a tsunami modeller at the PMEL. "We can put the sensors in a place 5 minutes away from the sources," he says. Once the front of the tsunami reaches a DART sensor, Titov says, it takes another 5-10 minutes for half of the wave to pass by, thereby revealing the height of the tsunami.
The United States is now hoping to move some of its DART buoys nearer to earthquake sources - along the Cascadia subduction zone and in many other regions, says Titov. Warning centres will then combine the DART data with spatial models of coastlines to predict the severity of the flooding more quickly. "Within half an hour, you can get a very high-quality forecast showing which areas are going to be inundated," he says. And that would help emergency managers to decide which areas should be evacuated, and when to urge people to move to higher ground.
In the regions closest to an earthquake, however, many people would die if they waited for those results. The first waves from a Cascadia tsunami can hit in 15-20 minutes, and the problem is even worse in Japan and the Aleutian Islands, where some regions have only a few minutes of lead time. Emergency managers are therefore developing a tiered approach, in which they issue quick warnings that are updated as measurements come in from the sea-floor sensors.

Ups and downs

The Tohoku earthquake shows how those data can help - and hurt. At an international meeting last month in Sendai, Japan, Osamu Kamigaichi from the JMA described some of the problems that his agency ran into during the disaster. When the quake struck at 2:46 p.m. local time, the agency quickly determined its size and location from records of short-period seismic waves, the first data to become available. The JMA then used pre-computed tsunami simulations for the estimated quake to forecast the height of the waves. The warning with those details went out within 3 minutes.

This method works well for quakes smaller than magnitude 8, but it can't gauge the size of larger shocks. The JMA didn't consider that a problem, however, because the estimated size of the Tohoku event was 7.9, about the size of the largest earthquake expected there. But the quake turned out to have a magnitude of 9.0, more than ten times stronger.

The first hints that something was amiss came at 2:58 p.m., 9 minutes after the first warning, when a cabled pressure sensor picked up an unexpectedly large change in sea level off Iwate prefecture (see 'Warning signs'). But the agency did not have a fully developed method for using data from that sensor to update the tsunami warnings.
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Opmmur

Time Travel Professor
Messages
5,049
From Earth Changes Media
Breaking News
Magnitude 6.9 Quake Hits Honshu, Japan
By Earth Changes Media
Mar 14, 2012 - 11:22:36 AM


A magnitude 6.9 earthquake has struck off the northeastern coast of Japan almost exactly one year after a devastating tsunami killed thousands.


honshu5_med.jpg


A destructive widespread tsunami was not generated based on historical earthquake and tsunami data. However, earthquakes of this size sometimes generate local tsunamis that can be destructive along coasts located within a hundred kilometers of the earthquake epicenter. Authorities in the region of the epicenter should be aware of this possibility and take appropriate action.

The Japan Meteorological agency may also issue a tsunami message for this event to countries in the Northwest Pacific and South China Sea region. In case of conflicting information, the more conservative information should be used for safety.

Wednesday's tremor came just days after Japan marked the anniversary of the March 11, 2011 disaster. At the time, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the strongest seismic event to ever hit the country, triggered a massive tsunami.

The giant wave killed 15,900 and smashed the Fukushima nuclear power plant, causing the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
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Rosco..Jones

Member
Messages
363
How Dangerous Is It?
28 April, 2012
dangeroussloud.jpg
MessageToEagle.com - A highly poisonous cloud depleted with uranium and radioactive material is heading towards the United States. There are many conflicting reports and it remains unclear just how dangerous the cloud is. On April 22, at 2:a5 am, the Mitsui petrochemical plant exploded in the town Wagi Yamaguchi, Japan. One worker, and 11 people were injured. In their press release, the plant owner Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. (Toshikazu Tanaka, President & CEO) declared that "causes of the accident are under investigation by authorities."

Two explosions at a chemical plant in western Japan took place on April 22.

In addition, the company ensured that there was "no report of leakage of hazardous substances or materials at this time.
Premises warehouses store catalysts waste which includes radioactive material.
This material is stored in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.
Storage facilities are over 500 meters from the affected area and there has been no report of changes in either containers or radiation measurements as compared with those prior to the accident."
A second explosion took place at 8:00 am on the same day.

The plant had 3,400 drums of used catalytic agent containing radioactive materials on the premises, but the explosions did not appear to have any effect on radiation levels. According to Mitsui Chemical there is no damage to the containers. The radioactive agent is harmless to people, Mitsui Chemicals claimed.

dangcloud2.jpg
Possible movement of the cloud. Image credit: Dutchsinse

Credit: Dutchsinse​

Despite the reassurances of that no release of toxic material was released, people are still very worried. The explosion created a cloud that could be poisonous. The cloud is moving across the Pacific Ocean heading straight for the United States. It is essential that scientists monitor unusual weather patterns and possible radiation levels.

 

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