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Rare Video: Japan Tsunami | National Geographic


all across northern Japan they felt it a
violent magnitude 9.0 earthquake on
March 11 2011 it was centered about 80
miles offshore and tsunami warnings went
up immediately in coastal cities people
knew what to do next run to higher
ground it’s from these vantage points on
hills and in tall buildings that
incredible footage was captured in
Kesennuma people retreated to a
high-rise rooftop and could only watch
in horror as tsunami waves inundated
their city
knocking buildings into rubble and
mixing into a kind of tsunami soup
filled with vehicles building parts and
contents seawater cascaded over sea
walls and Indesit EES this video shows
the water rushing over an 18-foot
seawall in the comedy city the seawall
here was the world’s deepest and largest
but not enough for the magnitude of the
March 11 disaster it was the largest
quake ever known in Japan and one of the
five largest recorded in the world more
than 28,000 people are confirmed dead or
missing when two tectonic plates pushed
together under the sea the resulting
earthquake sends an enormous burst of
energy up through the ocean displacing
enormous quantities of water with the
upward motion a series of waves expands
in all directions in deep water these
waves travel fast up to 500 miles an
hour but only reach a height of a few
feet a passing ship might not even
notice but as the waves enter shallow
waters friction with the ocean floor
lowers
of speed but raises their height this
video is from a Japan Coast Guard ship
confronting a tsunami wave in shallow
water on March 11 and a rare view from
the air video of a tsunami wave
approaching the shoreline in Japan some
tsunami waves reached as far as 3 miles
inland Japan may be the most
seismological II studied country in the
world and with more than 1,200
high-precision GPS stations a
geophysicist at the University of Alaska
used the data to create a visualization
of the March 11 quake the waves of
displacement that you see we’re moving
as fast as 5 miles per second
in this photo the ripples of tsunami
waves are seen moving upstream in the
naka river at katachi naka city new
technology left an enormous amount of
visual evidence for studying years to
come and can perhaps help us better
understand the power of earthquakes and
tsunamis and prevent loss of life in the
future
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