Japan’s recent massive earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, appears to have moved the island by about 2.4m, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said on Saturday.
“That’s a reasonable number,” USGS seismologist Paul Earle said. “Eight feet, that’s certainly going to be in the ballpark.”
Friday’s magnitude 8.9 quake unleashed a terrifying tsunami that engulfed towns and cities on Japan’s northeastern coast, -destroying everything in its path.
The quake and its tectonic shift resulted from “thrust faulting” along the boundary of the Pacific and North America plates, according to the USGS.
The Pacific plate pushes under a far western wedge of the North America plate at the rate of about 83mm per year, but a colossal earthquake can provide enough of a jolt to dramatically move the plates, with catastrophic consequences.
“With an earthquake this large, you can get these huge ground shifts,” Earle said. “On the actual fault you can get 20m of relative movement, on the two sides of the fault.”
He said similar movements would have been seen in recent earthquakes in Chile and Indonesia.
In December 2004, a magnitude 9.1 quake off Sumatra caused a tsunami that killed an estimated 228,000 people. An 8.8 quake off the coast of Chile in February last year killed more than 500.
There was not a similar ground shift in the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that devastated Haiti in February last year, Earle said.
“A magnitude 7.0 is much smaller than the earthquake that just happened in Japan,” he said. “We’ve had aftershocks [in Japan] larger than the Haiti earthquake.”
Kenneth Hudnut, a USGS geophysicist, said experts read data, including from global positioning systems, to determine the extent of the shift.
“We know that one GPS station moved [2.4m] and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass,” he told CNN.
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
A judge in Bangladesh issued an arrest warrant for the British member of parliament and former British economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq, who is a niece of former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in August last year in a mass uprising that ended her 15-year rule. The Bangladeshi Anti-Corruption Commission has been investigating allegations against Siddiq that she and her family members, including Hasina, illegally received land in a state-owned township project near Dhaka, the capital. Senior Special Judge of Dhaka Metropolitan Zakir Hossain passed the order on Sunday, after considering charges in three separate cases filed
APPORTIONING BLAME: The US president said that there were ‘millions of people dead because of three people’ — Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskiy US President Donald Trump on Monday resumed his attempts to blame Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for Russia’s invasion, falsely accusing him of responsibility for “millions” of deaths. Trump — who had a blazing public row in the Oval Office with Zelenskiy six weeks ago — said the Ukranian shared the blame with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered the February 2022 invasion, and then-US president Joe Biden. Trump told reporters that there were “millions of people dead because of three people.” “Let’s say Putin No. 1, but let’s say Biden, who had no idea what the hell he was doing, No. 2, and
RSS