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June 16, 2014
Watch buildings move during earthquakes
Through literal eons of Earth’s history, earthquakes have heaved the ground, shuddered the trees, and sent fauna scurrying. Yet aside from the occasional tsunami and the localized sloughing of rock faces and hillsides, they’d never really been directly injurious to the animal kingdom. …Until the animals started “sheltering” themselves under ponderous weights of precarious things. As the adage goes, “earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do.” That edifice that so importantly protects you …
March 12, 2014
Tohoku tsunami maps: lessons for the Pacific Northwest
As we pass the three-year mark since one of the most astoundingly gargantuan earthquakes in human history, we marvel at the unprecedented opportunity it gave us to understand earthquakes, tsunamis, oceanic subduction, litho-hydro-atmospheric coupling, plate tectonics, and the Earth itself. We can also appreciate, with humble reverence, the lessons it continues to teach us about the social dimensions of disaster trauma, risk, and resilience. Japan continues to struggle, now largely …
August 13, 2013
Another heart-stopping tsunami video from Japan
A “new” video has emerged of the Tohoku tsunami racing inland in a Japanese port town. I don’t know that it’s never been released before, but I sure haven’t seen it, and I’ve seen basically all of them. The video is embedded at the end of this post. Update 8/19/13: I have changed the video link to a more original YouTube video. It appears that the videographer is a Mr. …
November 21, 2012
Amazing liquefaction in Tokyo
A new video from Japan [embedded below] shows liquefaction occurring at a scale and scope that I haven’t seen before in video footage. The video is from Urayasu town, Chiba Prefecture–an industrial suburb of Tokyo that appears to be sited on made land adjacent to Tokyo Bay. No wonder it sloshes so heavily: made land (fill) is particularly susceptible to liquefaction. We just can’t pack things down the way nature can …
June 17, 2011
First-hand documentaries from the Tohoku quake and tsunami
Several eye-witnesses of the March 11 M9.0 in Japan have posted chilling first-hand footage of their experiences. The following two videos document the entire disaster, from the shaking until deep into the tsunami. First, here’s the harrowing video taken by a professional storm chaser who happened to be in Otsuchi, Japan doing volunteer work for Save Japan Dolphins when the earthquake roared along the coast. He struggles to keep his …
May 5, 2011
Swaying high-rises and resonance frequencies
In a post a few weeks ago I linked to a humbling video of high-rise buildings in Tokyo swaying after the 9.0 quake. Well, those buildings were full of tens of thousands of people, plenty of whom had cameras. That video was only the beginning; below are many more that capture the dramatic oscillation of the towering steel edifices. The swaying is especially clear in the following video, likely filmed …
April 18, 2011
Japanese videos of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami
So many videos of the March 11 M9.0 Tohoku earthquake and ensuing tsunami exist that collecting and disseminating them is a daunting task. In my three earlier posts on the subject I referred you to a variety of perspectives of both events (the quake and the tsunami). Since then plenty more clips have emerged, and continue to. I’ll make an attempt to guide you to a few of the more …
March 21, 2011
Unwarranted alarmism, and a hiatus for field work
There have been plenty of doomsday claims circulating the internet in the wake of the massive 9.0 “Tohoku” earthquake–lots about supermoons, some about dead fish, some merely about some alleged “pattern” of recent quakes circling the Pacific, a pattern generally conveniently selected to only include earthquakes that have hit the news. I won’t bother to give any of these claims too much credence by linking to them here, but they’re …
March 12, 2011
Animation of Japan quake traversing the U.S.
The data-consolidating institutional consortium IRIS–the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology–has a spectacular resource to visualize actual seismic waves propagating around the Earth, that everyone should check out. Here is an animation they put together (they do this for every significant quake) displaying ground motion at recording stations set up around the U.S. You can see the dramatic passage of the seismic waves from the 8.9 quake, and you get glimpses …
