Miami Earthquake Research Paper

At 2:46 p.m. one of the deadliest earthquakes shook Japan on March 11th 2011. A 500 kilometre-long fault zone was ruptured off the northeast coast of Japan. The epicentre was situated 130 kilometres east from the big city, Sendai. The focus occurred at a relatively shallow depth (about 30 km) underneath the Pacific Ocean.

The earthquake had the largest magnitude of 9.0, which Japan had ever recorded and can only be explained by plate tectonics. As seen in figure 3, the earthquake occurred in a subducting zone where the Eurasian plate and the Pacific plate are converging. Figure 4 shows the continental Eurasian plate being subducting the oceanic Pacific plate and every year the pacific plate travels a distance of nine centimetres towards
Due to the quake, an upthrust of ten metres from the pacific plate resulted in an enormous tsunami. The force caused devastating fifteen metre waves to propel against the north east coastline of Japan and the waves travelled a distance of 10km inland. The tsunami contributed to the astonishing 15, 891 deaths, flooding cities and demolishing everything in its path. Not only did the tsunami do enough damage but it disabled the cool down of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants due to insufficient cooling which led to a shutdown on March 12th 2011. As seen in figure 5, the power plants overheated and went into flames releasing dangerous radioactive materials into the atmosphere and Pacific Ocean and was rated a seven on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The government still fears to release people back because of the dangerous radioactive materials but fortunately no one died due to the radiation poising. In addition the earthquake and tsunami both were the cause of 1.2 million building destroyed and costing the government an estimated 567 billion dollars in repairs. In figure 6, a rescue crew was sent to salvage any injured or killed people under the
Both earthquakes shared very high magnitudes of 9.1-9.3 and 9.1. The Japan earthquake was situated in northeast Japan whereas the Indian Ocean earthquake was located west of Sumatra, Indonesia. Similarly, both earthquakes’ focus was at a shallow depth of 30km. Also the two earthquakes were the result of converging plates. Although both earthquakes caused tsunamis, the Indian Ocean earthquakes’ tsunami was three times taller than the Japan tsunami having 30m high tidal waves. Also many buildings collapsed due to both earthquakes high magnitudes. Unlike the Indian earthquake, Japan experienced nuclear meltdown at the Daiichi power plants causing dangerous radioactive material to be released. There was a dramatic difference in death rates with Sumatra having over 230, 000 deaths compared to Japan with only 15, 000. This may have been because Sumatra is a third world country and there may have not have been as much medical support as Japan and also the magnitude and tsunami was much bigger. The estimated repair cost for the Japan is 567 billion dollars in repairs compared to Sumatra with only 4 billion dollars in repairs. This is evident when the amount of buildings destroyed in Japan was 1.2 million whereas Sumatra estimated only 141, 000 buildings