DescentBB

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/0 ... 1&iref=BN1

8.9 is very near to 9.5.

Well, it's not that much over 10% the power of a 9.5 quake, but it's still potentially devastating.

That's still a huge quake, and last I heard (earlier this morning), the death toll was at least in the hundreds.

The resulting tsunamis even caused evacuations as far away as Hawaii and California, which hopefully spurs some action on the proposal to create an international tsunami warning system.

Foil wrote:international tsunami warning system.

With all our technology you'd think we'd have one in place.

SilverFJ wrote:

Foil wrote:international tsunami warning system.

With all our technology you'd think we'd have one in place.

Yeah, you'd think we'd have one after that last large one in 2004.

8.9 is a huge qauke. And it was 24KM under the water. Has it been higher up, it could of been worse. Still not good. They are having trouble cooling a nuclear reactor. If that blows, we all know what will happen.

Hey, guys. I was playing a little D2 and got carried away. Sorry about that.

Foil wrote:That's still a huge quake, and last I heard (earlier this morning), the death toll was at least in the hundreds.

The resulting tsunamis even caused evacuations as far away as Hawaii and California, which hopefully spurs some action on the proposal to create an international tsunami warning system.

Woke up this morning to the local TV news telling people that the tsunami warning sirens had gone off in all the Oregon coastal communities and evacuations had started at around 3 in the morning our time. That's a rude awakening.

http://www.nwcn.com/news/117796878.html

There was quite a bit of damage in a few harbors though. Brookings Harbor got hit.

http://www.kval.com/news/local/117820628.html

But the damage in Japan pales to our little wave. That was a very big earthquake. There must have been a huge displacement of ocean bottom. We live in a subduction zone in Oregon and we are way overdue for our own great quake. Not looking forward to that little earth temper tantrum in the future.

The 1964 Alaska quake was upgraded to a 9.2 a few years back, which was equivalent to 946 megatons of TNT. The 1960 Valdivia, Chile quake was a 9.5, or a 2.67 gigatons. But no human has ever recorded a 10 earthquake, which is equivalent to 15 gigatons. The real earthshaker was the Yucatan Peninsula meteor impact the supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs. It was equivalent to a 12.5 quake with the power of 100 teratons!

They do have regional tsunami warning systems with pretty much full coverage of this area (most of it this: http://ptwc.weather.gov/). An international system would be pretty much nothing but combining the regional systems into one, I'd suspect.

I don't know anyone in Japan but it's hard not to feel terrible looking at those pictures on the news.

(CNN) -- The powerful earthquake that unleashed a devastating tsunami Friday appears to have moved the main island of Japan by 8 feet (2.4 meters) and shifted the Earth on its axis."

"Reports from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy estimated the 8.9-magnitude quake shifted the planet on its axis by nearly 4 inches (10 centimeters)."

The burning oil refinery would have been awesome if not for the fact that you're probably staring at dozens of millions of dollars of losses right there.

Ah well. I'm actually happy their buildings did better than Christchurch's. The quake wasn't directly underneath I suppose, which helped, but it was 8000 times more powerful.