Japan Earthquake & Tsunami News

Watch the ground split: man captures jaw-dropping footage of Japan quake

Brent Kooi was in a Chiba Park when the huge earthquake hit Japan on March 11. He calmly films and narrates as the ground splits and literally opens and closes with each huge tremor. Water seeps to the surface and spits each time the cracks close (you can hear the squish in the background). Early in the video, far in the background you can see two Japanese women startle and stand up. One of them yells kowai! kowai!, which literally means "scary" or "I'm scared," but in this situation she's exclaiming it involuntarily so in English it's more like Oh my God! Oh my God Chiba City is just east of Tokyo.

Thanks to Mary Jo Fiorella, who emailed a link to the clip on CNN's website.

 

Aerial footage of damaged reactors

Jiji News Agency has posted aerial footage of damaged reactors #3, #4, and #1 of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (a.k.a. Plant 1).  View below or directly on YouTube here.

 

Video: amateur inside Sendai Airport Terminal captures tsunami wall of water

This video became available a couple of days ago, but I missed it. Someone inside the Sendai Airport caught mind-numbing footage of the wall of water that swept away everything in the parking lot in front of the terminal.

 

Narrated animation model of Japan tsunami

 

March 11 quake was 20x longer and 1,450 x larger than one that destroyed Kobe

The below image was captured from an excellent English-language NHK documentary that provides a wealth of information on the history of tsunamis in northeastern Japan and demonstrates how this was a once-in-a-millennium disaster of gargantuan proportions. The pic shows two seismic waves. The bottom one represents the destructive earthquake that hit Kobe in the mid 90's and killed around 6,000 people. It was a 7 magnitude quake that lasted 15 seconds. Compare that to the one above which was recorded during Friday's quake, which lasted a whopping FIVE MINUTES and threw off much larger amplitude waves (click to see a larger version).

Here is a 15-minute segment from the aforementioned documentary that I found on YouTube. It's well worth watching.