Tohoku-Oki Earthquake Archives

18 April 2018

Tohoku tsunami impacted home-building habits of eco-engineer heart urchins

In a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, researchers explore how tsunamis impact shallow marine environments, also known as benthic environments, and the small, burrowing animals that dwell there.

Return to Tohoku – Taking a big quake’s temperature

There’s a hole in the bottom of the ocean near Japan, the deepest ever drilled for science. It leads to the heart of one of the world’s most dangerous faults, the one that unleashed the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which devastated Japan’s east coast. The earthquake’s power astonished geologists, who didn’t think the fault was capable of such destruction.To find out why the quake was so massive, an international team drilled through more than 800 meters of rock, seven kilometers beneath the waves, to take the fault’s temperature.

Atmospheric electrons may act differently before megaquakes

Just before the recent huge earthquake in Japan, electron counts in the atmosphere high above the epicenter took a surprising turn, a new study indicates. Measurements gleaned from GPS satellites recorded more electrons in the ionosphere over the soon-to rupture fault than expected. A similar uptick occurred before extra-large quakes in Chile in 2010 and Sumatra in 2004, the researcher found.

A tantalizing question for seismologists and atmospheric scientists is whether this high-altitude electron bump, if confirmed by other studies, is a true early-warning signal for devastating earthquakes.