Another earthquake off the coast of Japan.

[elvis]

Powerful quake hits off eastern Japan coast, prompting tsunami warning

Yikes.

 

[Toro]

Its nowhere on the news.

At least not yet.

 

[elvis]

cnn's finally got it.


Major earthquake strikes off the northern coast of Japan - CNN.com

 

[waltky]

Recovery from quake, tsunami slow going...

Japan towns hit hardest by tsunami stuck in limbo
Mon, Aug 08, 2011 - Gazing down on the gray, rubble-strewn valley, as a backhoe lifts twisted metal into one of hundreds of piles, Takako Abe clutches her walker and points to where her house once stood.

From the same hill, she and scores of others watched a huge tsunami obliterate the Japanese fishing town of Minamisanriku on March 11. By June, she could see a few signs of rebirth. The main roads had been cleared, and cars pulled up to gasoline pumps powered by humming generators. Workers raised telephone poles, and about 1,200 temporary houses had gone up. Still, the recovery is only inching along in the hardest-hit towns. Many survivors remain in limbo, gripped by deep fears and uncertainties that raise questions about Minamisanriku’s future. Nearly 1,200 of its 18,000 residents are dead or missing. Hundreds more have left to live with relatives or seek jobs elsewhere. Those who remain are conflicted.

“I don’t really want to live here, but I’ve spent so many years in this town,” says Abe, who came to Minamisanriku more than four decades ago as a 23-year-old bride. Her former neighbor, 74-year-old Kiyoo Sato, comes over to chat. Together they look out at mountains of crumpled cars, concrete and wood. “Can my grandchildren work and live here?” Sato wonders out loud. Many speak of a deep bond with this town, where families have lived for generations, but what will the reconstruction plan will look like? How will they survive until the town is rebuilt? Will another tsunami hit? “I’m not sure if we can return,” says Sato, who lost his wife in the tsunami. “We need to see what the authorities decide. It’s hard to know the future.”

While death and destruction was severe along much of Japan’s northeastern coast, a handful of communities face a particularly uncertain future. One is Minamisanriku; others include Rikuzentakata and Otsuchi, both farther to the north. They stand out because more than half their residents died or were left homeless, their town centers were destroyed and government was paralyzed by the loss of so many officials and documents. Already, these towns are falling behind. In the less damaged Ofunato, for example, the fish market reopened last month. “The gap is widening and affecting the pace of the reconstruction process, and people in worse-off towns are really worried whether they can recover,” says Junichi Hirota, a professor at Iwate University and a member of a government reconstruction study group.

Up and down the coast, there is talk of rebuilding better than before — towns and cities less polluted, better protected from tsunamis and more easily navigable by aging populations. Reconstruction also could be an opportunity to create jobs if the processing and sales of fish and farm products can be expanded, Hirota says. However, the extent of the damage means it may be as long as three years before people can start building permanent homes again. Fishermen, their lives wedded to the sea, may wait it out, Hirota says. Others may despair and leave. At the water’s edge, where seagulls sit on the skeleton of the destroyed fish market and warehouses, 52-year-old Choya Goto fixes a boom on his fishing boat, bent from lifting debris out of the harbor.

MORE

 

[waltky]

Would have thought the wave would have dissipated before then...

Japan Tsunami Broke Antarctic Ice Shelf
Tue Aug 9, 2011 : Anyone who saw any of the footage of the devastation wreaked upon Japan by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami - as most of us have done - can have no doubt about the overwhelming power they contained and unleashed. Now researchers have found that the force of the tsunami was so great that it was able to break several pieces of ice, totaling more than twice the size of Manhattan, from an Antarctic ice shelf 8,000 miles from the quake's epicenter.

Writing in the online version of the Journal of Glaciology, Kelly Brunt of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues describe how researchers have long suspected that repeated flexing of an ice shelf as a result of forces from a seismic event could lead to the calving of icebergs, but there had been no observations to confirm the theory. And so, shortly after the March 11 earthquake struck, Brunt and colleagues calculated the likely path the tsunami would follow throughout the Pacific basin in anticipation of such an event occurring.

They focused their attention on the Sulzberger Ice Shelf, on the northeast coast of the Ross Sea south of New Zealand. Remarkably, approximately 18 hours after the tsunami struck Japan, a gap in the clouds above the ice shelf revealed the presence of one large iceberg that had broken off. Recourse to cloud-penetrating radar satellites uncovered the existence of another large iceberg with several smaller ones also breaking away behind them. Brunt and colleagues estimate that by the time the tsunami reached the Antarctic coast, waves were only a foot or so high, but even so, the scientists say the consistency of the swell was enough to cause the icebergs to fracture from an outcrop of ice that had apparently stood unbroken since at least 1965, when it was captured by aerial photographs.

"In the past we've had calving events where we've looked for the source. It's a reverse scenario – we see a calving and we go looking for a source," Brunt said in a press release. "We knew right away this was one of the biggest events in recent history – we knew there would be enough swell. And this time we had a source."

Source