2. Facts and Causes…. Primary impacts….
Secondary impacts….
Responses….
How were many lives saved?
3.
4. • Japan's main Honshu island sits at the intersection of three
continental plates, the Eurasian, Pacific and Philippine Sea plates,
which are slowly grinding against each other, building up enormous
seismic pressure that every so often is realised with ferocious force.
• Japan accounts for about 20 per cent of the world's earthquakes of
magnitude six or greater and on average, an earthquake occurs
there every five minutes.
• When earthquakes occur under the sea floor, they unleash tsunamis
which are often more devastating than the quake itself.
• Tsunamis, from the Japanese word for harbour and wave, are vast
quantities of water displaced by the violent movement of the earth's
crust.
5. As the epicentre was so
close to the coast it gave
people very little warning
time before the tsunami hit.
6.
7. The quake was the most powerful to
hit Japan in recorded history and the
tsunami it unleashed travelled
across the Pacific Ocean, triggering
tsunami warnings and alerts for 50
countries as far away as the western
coasts of Canada, the U.S. and Chile .
A Tsun
8.
9.
10. The quake triggered more than 160
aftershocks in the first 24 hours -- 141
measuring 5.0-magnitude or more.
11. The quake occurred as the Earth's
crust ruptured along an area about 250
miles long by 100 miles wide, as
tectonic plates slipped more than 18
meters, said Shengzao Chen, a USGS
geophysicist.
12. Japan is located along the Pacific "ring of fire," an area of
high seismic and volcanic activity stretching from New
Zealand in the South Pacific up through Japan, across to
Alaska and down the west coasts of North and South
America. The quake was "hundreds of times larger" than
the 2010 quake that ravaged Haiti, said Jim Gaherty at
Columbia University.
15. One tectonic plate dove violently beneath
another, causing a nearly 300-mile (480-
km) swath of the seafloor to lurch upward.
The surface around that fault is pushed up
and then dropped back down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyKgamjegtQ
22. TSUNAMI…
24 foot wall of water. 4 times as big as a 6 foot man.
• http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/environment/env
ironment-natural-disasters/tsunamis/tsunami-101.html?
source=link_tw20110311tsunamivideo
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12725646
31. Vehicles that were ready for shipping….impacts for the economy…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12711226 http://www.abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm before and after
images.
33. Relief as tsunami runs out of steam…
Ports and beaches were temporarily shut
and islanders and coastal residents ordered
to higher ground up and down Latin
America's Pacific seaboard ahead of the
tsunami surge triggered by the killer
Japanese quake. But it did little damage.
By the time the tsunami waves travelled
across the wide Pacific Ocean and into the
southern hemisphere, only slightly higher
waters than normal came ashore in Mexico,
Honduras and Colombia, Ecuador's
Galapagos Islands, Chile's Easter Island
and Peru and Chile's mainlands.
Waves as high as six feet crashed into
South America - in some cases sending the
Pacific surging into streets - after coastal
dwellers rushed to close ports and schools
and evacuated several hundred thousand
people.
Major evacuations were ordered in Ecuador
and Chile, where hundreds of thousands of
people moved out of low-lying coastal
areas. After the devastating tsunami Chile
suffered following its major quake a year 5 people were swept out to sea and
ago, authorities weren't taking any chances.
Still, the danger waned as the day
millions of dollars damage caused to
progressed and minimal damage was boats at Santa Cruz, USA.
reported.
45. Explosion at nuclear reactor http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-
12721498 300 000 people evacuated from their homes after a leak is
confirmed. 22 suffered exposure to radiation. 12 mile exclusion zone.
46. OIL PRICES
• Temporary drop in oil prices – Japanese
oil refineries effected means USA oil
shares improve!
47. Japan’s industrial heart escapes
the heaviest blows
• Toyota close all plants in Japan. Honda and Nissan also
affected.
• Sony suspended production at 8 plants.
• As bad as the toll might eventually be in lives and property
from Japan’s earthquake and tsunami, the fact that the
disaster hit far from Japan’s industrial heartland will at least
soften the economic blow, both at home and abroad.
• “If this had been a couple hundred miles to the south, the
economic and human toll would have been almost
incomprehensible,” said Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at the
Peterson Institute for International Economics. “In that
respect, Japan dodged an enormous bullet here.”
• The rebuilding boom will be good news for the construction
industry.
48. • Over 10 000 dead.
• 9,500 people missing in the northern town of Minamisanriku.
Rescue crews in Japan trying to reach those stranded in the
ruins of Minamisanriku said the devastation resembled that
of total apocalypse. Rescuers in helicopters attempted to
land where they could, surrounded by a murky brown
wasteland littered with debris and ruined buildings.
• Troops found 300 to 400 bodies in the coastal city of
Rikuzentakata which was almost totally wiped out by the
tsunami.
Minamisanriku
49. Japanese earthquake causes the
day to get a tiny bit shorter….
• You won't notice it, but the day just got a tiny bit shorter
because of Friday's giant earthquake off the coast of
Japan.
• NASA geophysicist Richard Gross calculated that Earth's
rotation sped up by 1.6 microseconds. That's because of
the shift in Earth's mass caused by the 8.9-magnitude
earthquake. A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.
• That change in rotation speed is slightly more than the
one caused by last year's larger Chile earthquake. But
2004's bigger Sumatra earthquake caused a 6.8-
microsecond shortening of the day.
51. Japan has highly trained medical and search
and rescue teams ready for such a disaster.
Japanese rescue teams were some of the first
on the ground to help with the aftermath of the
Haiti earthquake in 2010.
52. A border collie named Byron trained to detect the scent of live casualties was part of a
59-strong group of specialists from the UK International Search and Rescue (UK-ISAR)
team jetting off to Japan the day after the disaster, carrying with them 11 tons of
equipment. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12725504
53. • 2 days after the quake,
the priorities are finding
food and fuel. People
queued for up to 2 miles
at petrol stations.
• People fill up containers
with fresh water at
standpipes.
• Few shops are open.
Supermarkets set up
shop in car parks.
• Text is the only way for
many to communicate.
• Little public transport.
• Fires burn where fire
crews cannot get
access.
54.
55. Preparedness saves lives…
Hidden inside the skeletons of high-rise towers, extra steel bracing,
giant rubber pads and embedded hydraulic shock absorbers make
modern Japanese buildings among the sturdiest in the world during a
major earthquake.
All along the Japanese coast, tsunami warning signs, towering
seawalls and well-marked escape routes offer some protection from
walls of water.
These precautions, along with earthquake and tsunami drills that are
routine for every Japanese citizen, show why Japan is the best-
prepared country in the world for the twin disasters of earthquake
and tsunami — practices that undoubtedly saved lives, though the
final death toll is unknown.
56.
57.
58. – In Japan, where earthquakes are common, building codes are
extremely stringent on specific matters like how much a building
may sway during a quake.
– After the Kobe earthquake in 1995, which killed about 6,000 people
and injured 26,000, Japan put enormous resources into new
research on protecting structures, as well as retrofitting the
country’s older and more vulnerable structures. Japan has spent
billions of dollars developing the most advanced technology against
earthquakes and tsunamis.
– Japan has gone much further than the United States in outfitting
new buildings with advanced devices called base isolation pads and
energy dissipation units to dampen the ground’s shaking during an
earthquake. The isolation devices are
essentially giant rubber-and-steel
pads that are installed at the very
bottom of the excavation for a
building, which then simply sits
on top of the pads. The
dissipation units are built into a
building’s structural skeleton.
They are hydraulic cylinders that
elongate and contract as the
building sways, sapping the
motion of energy.
59. • New apartment and office developments in Japan flaunt their seismic
resistance as a marketing technique, a fact that has accelerated the use of
the latest technologies, said Ronald O. Hamburger, a structural engineer in
the civil engineering society.
• “You can increase the rents by providing a sort of warranty — ‘If you locate
here you’ll be safe,’ ” Mr. Hamburger said.
• Although many older buildings in Japan have been retrofitted with new
bracing since the Kobe quake, there are many rural residences of older
construction that are made of very light wood that would be highly
vulnerable to damage. The fate of many of those residences is still
unknown.
60. Unlike Haiti, where shoddy construction vastly increased the
death toll last year, or China, where failure to follow
construction codes worsened the death toll in the devastating
2008 Sichuan earthquake, Japan enforces some of the world’s
most stringent building codes. Japanese buildings tend to be
much stiffer and stouter than similar structures in earthquake-
prone areas in California as well, said Mr. Moehle, the Berkeley
engineer: Japan’s building code allows for roughly half as much
sway back and forth at the top of a high rise during a major
quake.
61. • The country that gave the world the word tsunami, especially in the 80s
and 90s, built concrete seawalls in many communities, some as high as
40 feet, which amounted to its first line of defence against the water. In
some coastal towns, in the event of an earthquake, networks of sensors
are set up to set off alarms in individual residences and automatically
shut down floodgates to prevent waves from surging upriver.
• Critics of the seawalls say they are eyesores and bad for the
environment. The seawalls, they say, can instil a false sense of security
among coastal residents and discourage them from participating in
regular evacuation drills. Moreover, by literally cutting residents’ visibility
of the ocean, the seawalls reduce their ability to understand the sea by
observing wave patterns, critics say.
• Waves from Friday’s tsunami spilled over some seawalls in the affected
areas. “The tsunami roared over embankments in Sendai city, washing
cars, houses and farm equipment inland before reversing directions and
carrying them out to sea,”
62. Amidst the turmoil and sudden adversity that many families will be facing, Google has
launched its people finder on-line to help those who are looking for loved ones. This
service was also used for the Christchurch earthquake and many have found family and
friends via this useful and free service.
64. • But Japan’s “massive public education programme” could in
the end have saved the most lives, said Rich Eisner, a retired
tsunami preparedness expert.
• “For a trained population, a matter of 5 or 10 minutes is all you
may need to get to high ground,” Mr. Francis said.
• That would be in contrast to the much less experienced
Southeast Asians, many of whom died in the 2004 Indian
Ocean tsunami because they lingered near the coast. Reports
in the Japanese news media indicate that people originally
listed as missing in remote areas have been turning up in
schools and community centres, suggesting that tsunami
education and evacuation drills were indeed effective.
65. Your task:
• Produce a newspaper front page/report about
the Japanese earthquake/tsunami disaster of
March 2011.
• You should include information about
What caused the disaster (include a diagram)
What were the impacts – primary, secondary,
short term, longer term, social, economic,
environmental?
What were the responses in terms of aid?
How were many lives saved due to the actions
of Japan before the disaster struck?
66. Revise for Risky World assessment next lesson…
• The structure of the earth – core, mantle, crust.
• Why do the earth’s plates move? Convection currents.
• The name of the one big supercontinent (Pangea)
• What evidence we have that this was the case.
• The process of plates moving is called…. (continental drift)
• The names of the 3 different types of plate boundaries and what the plates are doing at each.
• What hazards (earthquakes or volcanoes or both) are found at each type of boundary.
• What comes out of a volcano when it explodes? (two things)
• What is meant by active, dormant, extinct?
• What is a shield volcano?
• What is a composite volcano?
• Where are the most volcanoes in the world found?
• What is a hotspot volcano?
• Why do earthquakes happen?
• Focus and epicentre?
• What does a seismograph do?
• How can we limit the damage caused by earthquakes?
• Why is this harder to do in poor/developing countries?
• What is a tsunami?
• What is aid?
• What kind of aid is needed immediately after a big disaster?
• Choose ONE of the named examples we have studied – Mt St Helen’s volcano, Haiti Earthquake or Japan
Tsunami – be able to say what caused it, what the impacts were and why it was such a big disaster. You
will be able to draw diagrams if you wish.