Japan's earthquake yesterday isn't a nightmare just for Japan: the resultant tsunamis radiating outward from the epicenter have hit Hawaii and are threatening parts of the North American west coast (in about an hour from this writing). Batten down the hatches!
Meanwhile, news from Japan itself is pretty horrific.
UPDATE: Check out BoingBoing here and here.
_
As you can imagine, the coverage here has been non-stop. The news and the images are indeed horrifying.
ReplyDeleteThe waves all propagated generally outward and eastward from Japan's eastern coastline, right?
ReplyDeleteHere's hoping that this latest disaster doesn't rank up there with the Kobe earthquake that killed 5000.
Kevin
"The waves all propagated generally outward and eastward from Japan's eastern coastline, right?"
ReplyDeleteWell, yes... except for the 10-meter one that swept over Japan's coast. But yeah, as horrific as it is, Japan in effect protected Korea from this wave.
I do indeed hope that the damage to life and property does not reach the level of the Kobe quake (by the way, Wikipedia lists the number of casualties for that quake at 6,434).
Did you see that the quake was strong enough to slightly alter the earth's axial tilt?
ReplyDeletere: Kobe
I guess I should have checked a different source. My quick and dirty Googling landed me this site, which sort of matched the "5000" figure vaguely floating around in my head.
Kevin
"Did you see that the quake was strong enough to slightly alter the earth's axial tilt?"
ReplyDeleteHoly crap. No, I did not. Wow, I'm looking at this on Wikipedia and in addition to the change in the tilt of the earth (by 25 cm), the rotation of the Earth increased in speed by 1.6 microseconds. The entire island of Honshu also shifted 2.4 m east!
That is insane. This whole thing is just horrible beyond words.
It certainly puts one's own everyday problems in perspective.
ReplyDeleteKevin