7.1 magnitude earthquake hits Japan

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/usc0002ksa.php

by ssclafani • 15 years ago

176 70 15 years ago

earthquake.usgs.gov

bluedanieru2• 15 years ago

There was some pretty strong shaking in Tokyo, warning of tsunami up to 2m in Miyagi, 1m elsewhere along the east coast down to Chiba. The tsunami will have arrived in Miyagi by now.

michaelty• 15 years ago

Hope all the HNers in Japan are safe.

jonny_eh• 15 years ago

I hope everyone else is safe too.

ozziegooen• 15 years ago

I appreciate that comment, but don't like how many up-votes it got. From my experience with Hacker News, the comments with the highest rankings are usually those that point out another post as stupid, instead of those that give valid information.

teejae• 15 years ago

In Tokyo, it was more like a 3.x, about a minute's worth of low-rumbling.

nandemo• 15 years ago

I was sleeping at that time. I might have been woken up by the shake, but I don't recall it. Well, I'm in Tokyo, here it was "only" a 3 in the Japanese scale.

orblivion• 15 years ago

Is this just an aftershock?

bluedanieru2• 15 years ago

I'd hesitate to say 'just', and there is a rigorous definition of aftershock that this may or may not fit, but it's very close to the big one last month and certainly related to it.

So I'd go with 'yeah, basically' in the absence of a seismologist telling me otherwise.

rbonvall• 15 years ago

In January there was a 6.9 quake here in Chile, and seismologists said it was an aftershock of the big earthquake of one year earlier. For what I recall, any earthquakes within a couple of years of the big one are most probably aftershocks.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

From the submitted link, as I see it at this moment: "This earthquake can be considered an aftershock of the March 11, 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku earthquake. The aftershock sequence of that event has been ongoing since March 11, and has included 58 earthquakes of M 6 or greater up until April 7 2011, two of which were greater than M 7 (M7.7 and M7.9, both on March 11)."

nickolai• 15 years ago

Page has been updated to 7.1

(EDIT : I see you updated the title. Also always good to see an earthquake magnitude overestimated)

z922• 15 years ago

So what was the magnitude before being corrected?

noodle• 15 years ago

7.4

aphexairlines4• 15 years ago

This sucks. Earthquakes used to be interesting but now when that alert goes off on phones + tv and the shockwave hits it's internal panic time.

wiredfool• 15 years ago

I wish I could downvote this as -1, duplicate.

raganwald• 15 years ago

Mentioning it's a duplicate is good, thank you. Next time this happens, a link to the original post would be very helpful.

flyosity• 15 years ago

He meant as a duplicate of the earthquake that already devastated Japan. He wished he could downvote it as a duplicate, that is, that it hadn't happened again.

currant• 15 years ago

Please do not add witty, insensitive comments, a pun is IMHO not a good reason to post.

bigfudge• 15 years ago

It's witty, but insensitive? And I don't think I'm alone in loving a good pun...

aphexairlines4• 15 years ago

Parts of Iwate lost power? http://twitter.com/#!/daiwaka/status/56008913857949696

electromagnetic• 15 years ago

Likely they did, but probably no more than would have happened anywhere in high-winds.

I know here in the Greater Toronto Area can get hit by blackouts frequently because of tree falls. Having moved here from the UK I don't get the idiotic notion of letting trees grow through your power lines because inevitably a branch or the whole tree will fall and knock out power. I've seen a few trees that are so big that no matter what way they fall, they'll knock out power to both sides of the street.

It's surely caused by the earthquake, but it's hard to tell if it would only be cause by the earthquake. You've got to draw a line between "act of god" and an "act of man" for being stupid enough to let an earthquake, windstorm or snowstorm knock your power out.

rodmiranda13• 15 years ago

Will radioactive water be spread?

JshWright• 15 years ago

Tsunamis (and waves in general) don't actually move the water they're traveling through over any significant distance. It's the wave's energy that's moving, not the water itself.

5h• 15 years ago

this is only true until the sea meets land.

z922• 15 years ago

Like the "Maxican Wave" spectators form in a stadium during games. Here the wave moves, but people don't.

mrtron• 15 years ago

If the water did spread, it would also dilute the radioactivity. So not really a concern.

aphexairlines4• 15 years ago

english feed: http://twitter.com/#!/list/TheTokyoPost/japan-earthquake-cov...

iM8t• 15 years ago

Any live stream up already?

dami• 15 years ago

Very sad news, I hope everyone there is safe.

Tichy• 15 years ago

I think this was probably a "normal" earthquake which Japan is built to withstand without many problems.

allwein• 15 years ago

True, but I imagine that Japanese infrastructure may have been compromised by the earlier earthquake, making this one more dangerous than it would be otherwise.

Much like the Flu is usually no big deal, but can easily kill people with any sort of immuno-deficiency.

powertower• 15 years ago

A 7.1 is 1.5 megatons of TNT Seismic Energy Yield.

A 9.2 is 2.5 gigatons.

whyenot• 15 years ago

The 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake killed 63 people and left thousands homeless in California in 1989.

TomOfTTB• 15 years ago

What made that quake significant was the duration (it went on for 15 seconds). That's a factor that supersedes the strength of the quake to an extent. Because a weaker quake will cause more damage over a long period of time.

Put it this way: Hit a wall with a hammer and you might cause a dent. Continually hit that wall with a hammer for 15 seconds and you'll probably break through.

whatusername• 15 years ago

And the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake was 6.3 - killing 181.

It's not just about the size - it's about where it actually hits. (Note that Christchurch had a 7.1 quake six months earlier with 0 deaths)

natural219• 15 years ago

Sorry if I'm being insensitive, but is this big news? I didn't think 7.1 was that powerful.

kovar• 15 years ago

Like real estate, it is about location, location, location. Think of it as a lever - if properly applied, it can move a world.

There's also the emotional component. The Japanese population has been shaken by the initial quake, the tsunami, aftershocks, and the problems at the nuclear reactor. Adding another significant quake and tsunami (2m, last report), will further rattle already stretched nerves.

geoffw82• 15 years ago

Nah, 7.1 is pretty big.

Its especially big news when you consider the events of the last 30 days.

antirez• 15 years ago

Yep, Messina, Sicily, and the tsunami caused a lot of deaths in that case if I remember correctly. Btw full details here -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1908_Messina_earthquake

icco• 15 years ago

7.1 is big. One of the deadliest earthquakes of all time was a 7.1 (although it was a 100 years ago...) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes#Deadliest_...

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Anything over about a 6.5 or so is a pretty big quake. The '89 bay area (Loma Prieta) quake was just a 7.1 (and struck 10s of miles from downtown San Francisco). The recent Haiti earthquake was just a 7.0.

compay• 15 years ago

It depends on many factors. I was in a 6.8 earthquake in Seattle in 2001 that did some fairly significant damage to a few buildings in Pioneer Square, but otherwise was just a scare and an inconvenience. At the time I read that we got off "easy" because of the depth of the epicenter. An earthquake of similar magnitude had hit Turkey a few years before that and did a lot more damage.

acconrad• 15 years ago

Here's (unfortunately) another reminder to donate to the relief fund via RedCross: https://american.redcross.org/site/Donation2?5052.donation=f...

steevdave• 15 years ago

How is this pertinent to HN but the Israel attacks on Gaza not?

nyellin• 15 years ago

An earthquake in Japan is not controversial and might have business implications for some people on HN.

Edit: Removed pro-Israel defense. This is not the place for a political discussion.

HelloBeautiful4• 15 years ago

>> This is not the place for a political discussion.

Your post is still politically loaded. Israel attacks on Gaza are as 'controversial' as evolution, global warming and tobacco causing cancer.

cma• 15 years ago

>NHK World TV reports that external electrical power supply has been cut in two of the three lines servicing the Ongawa nuclear power plant in the Miyagi prefecture because of the quake.

More tech-related than Gaza.

geoffw82• 15 years ago

Edit to be clearer: You must be joking.

ronnier• 15 years ago

user: steevdave

created: 29 days ago.

Please don't introduce these types of commets here. I left reedit over it.

aphexairlines4• 15 years ago

Saw some posts on twitter that nhk switched to a documentary about cranes about 40mins ago, but channel 1 here was still showing coverage until a couple minutes ago. Don't people mean NHK G when they mention NHK?

harshpotatoes2• 15 years ago

So, this brings the number of >6.5 mag earthquakes off the cost of japan in the past month up to like 12 I believe?*

Surely there is a geologist in the midst who can explain whether this is normal/expected?

*http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/qed/

pchristensen• 15 years ago

IANAG but IIRC quakes often happen in bunches like this as the earth's crust settles into a semi-stable state.

harshpotatoes2• 15 years ago

Yeah. I guess. And doing some more looking on the internet and possibly answering my own question, maybe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_swarm

It's hard to find useful information on line about this. But I guess that the lack of information in itself probably means that geologists aren't particularly worried about it.

shawnee_2• 15 years ago

Holy cow, this is an active day for semi-large earthquakes all over the planet:

  7.1 2011/04/07 14:32:42 NEAR THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
  5.8  	2011/04/07 20:41:54  NORTH OF HONDURAS
  6.5  	2011/04/07 13:11:25  VERACRUZ, MEXICO

source: http://quakes.globalincidentmap.com/

ars2• 15 years ago

There are earthquakes of magnitude 6 or larger quite often, probably every week. And under 6 (like the 5.8) are even more common.

shawnee_2• 15 years ago

There are earthquakes of magnitude 6 or larger quite often, probably every week. And under 6 (like the 5.8) are even more common.

I'll hold my assertion that it seems to be a more active week than normal in the seismological world.

Your comment adds nothing here and is not backed up by any evidence; "probably every week" does not count as evidence. The majority of the number that the USGS counts includes quakes below the ocean. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eqarchives/year/eqsta...

The USGS calls anything 6+ "large". A magnitude 6 earthquake can be deadly. Even magnitude 5 < can be deadly. There are factors at work depth of the quake as well as other factors, like location where it hits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadly_earthquakes_sinc...

mkramlich2• 15 years ago

I've flagged this for being off-topic for HN. Hopefully others will join me.

bad_user• 15 years ago

There's offtopic and then there's offtopic.

I think this one is OK -- and personally if I see another article about how awesome or evil or dickish (or whatever) Facebook/Twitter/Microsoft/Google are, or about how shitty News Corp handled Myspace, or simply showbiz/yellow journalism junk (i.e. pictures of Jobs meeting with Schmidt) I think I'm going to puke.

But there's lots of offtopic articles (i.e. not related to startups or hacking) everyday -- complaining about it just adds more noise and is completely pointless.

mkramlich2• 15 years ago

I didn't complain. Simply took action to help fight noise and hoped to rally others to do the same. I consider a report of Yet Another Earthquake in Japan to be off-topic. We have mainstream news sources for that. And if it's truly important, that sort of news will find us. Through other channels.

7.1 magnitude earthquake hits Japan

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