Was in a hotel in Sapporo, almost got thrown out of bed. Lot of people in the hotel lobby now.
Considering leaving Hokkaido by air if a Hokkaido and Sanriku Subsequent Earthquake Advisory is issued, don't really want to be in a potential megaquake.
People were freaking about the July megaquake prophecy and nothing happened. Trying to time it is silly, just chill and enjoy your stay, you'll probably be fine.
Good luck, the Sapporo Chitose airport is closed for inspection of both runways.
BTW, you are safer in hotel than outside. No need to stay in lobby, go to bed, just protect your head. I experienced much bigger one in Sapporo in 2018.
Modern buildings like hotels are built to withstand earthquakes of some magnitudes. Wouldn't count on that at a local construction site or a worn down house you might pass on the street.
This would be the tenth major earthquake (7+ magnitude) along the Pacific ring of fire this year.
With the Kamchatka and other earthquakes in the news recently I had a fear that were building to some major event but turns out that this year is about average if not slightly below average for major quakes along the ring of fire.
I heard that smaller (relative) earthquakes actually lower the prob of larger ones, so maybe it is a good thing? A bunch of 7.X earthquakes in the ocean are not going to be hugely destructive.
On the one hand earthquakes remove tension from the earth’s crust and release energy that can’t be used in future shocks.
On the other hand, if a shock doesn’t release all energy it may come to rest in a relatively weak spot that will soon give away again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_swarm: “The Matsushiro swarm lasted from 1965 to 1967 and generated about 1 million earthquakes. This swarm had the peculiarity of being sited just under a seismological observatory installed in 1947 in a decommissioned military tunnel. It began in August 1965 with three earthquakes too weak to be felt, but three months later, a hundred earthquakes could be felt daily. On 17 April 1966, the observatory counted 6,780 earthquakes, with 585 of them having a magnitude great enough to be felt, which means that an earthquake could be felt, on average, every two and a half minutes.”)
Because of that, I think an earthquake will increase the probability of one occurring again soon, but decrease its strength.
> A bunch of 7.X earthquakes in the ocean are not going to be hugely destructive.
New Zealand’s 5th most deadly disaster was Christchurch’s 6.2 which killed 185 people. It was a shallow aftershock from a larger, less destructive quake.
Almost all energy released in earthquakes is released in the biggest ones. No realistic number of smaller quakes is ever going to add up to even the single biggest earthquake ever recorded.
That's correct, if relatively small earthquakes would stop that could be the precursor to a much bigger one. It's like releasing tension gradually rather than all at once.
This type of argument is kind of logical but not so immediately useful. Earthquakes just happen and no one is involved in that process. There could still be the big one coming, or that one might have been defused by this one. No one knows.
(stresses build up and are often released through many small, unfelt earthquakes (25:54). If these small movements don't dissipate the stress, it can accumulate and lead to a powerful chain reaction (26:25) * disclaimer I used YouTube's built-in AI to find/summarize the timestamps, as I couldn't remember offhand where it was when I previously watched this.
I don't believe the video quite says this (I watched the relevant section).
It's worth noting that they are mostly interested in critical phenomena in general, and earthquakes are kind of a drive-by application, treated along with fires and sand piles.
They do hint around the edges, but they don't head-on make the claim for earthquakes that small EQs materially lessen stress buildup and thereby make larger EQ's less likely.
I was looking for a credential of one of the people they interview, to see if they are really a solid earth person or more of a critical phenomena person -- their names aren't easy to find. This particular myth ("small earthquakes relieve stress") is a bit of a stinker in the solid earth community, and I think a solid earth person would be quite careful about their words as they discuss this.
I think you intended this to be a validation of the idea that small quakes relieve stress and therefore lower the chance of a large quake.
The above link does not answer that question. It is relating stress release to "fault strength", or the maximum shear stress that can be withstood by the fault. There is an incidental relationship with depth that plays a role.
The video linked nearby (on criticality) also does not address the question at issue.
I'm only replying because I work adjacent to this area, and my understanding is that the idea that small EQ's release stress is a myth. Here [1] is another link, listed as #1 in the "Myths" category. And you can dig up quotes from none other than Lucy Jones [2] saying that this is a myth.
I don't work directly in this area, so I'm not willing to say absolutely no. But I'd really like to see a head-on reference supporting the claim that it's not a myth.
GP is correct; I'm not sure why CA gov is calling that a myth (it's not). However keep in mind that it's not necessarily true 100% of the time. Or at least the things it might seem to imply at first glance aren't true - the presence or absence of small quakes in a given period doesn't necessarily tell you anything useful about the future.
Indeed. But I get why people are confused because it is a subtle difference between 'stress relieved through small earthquakes is stress expended' vs 'stress relieved through small earth quakes is not indicative of the magnitude of future events'.
The long term absence of stress relief small quakes on a known fault line might be bad news, or no news at all, statistics are where the difference is here, not in particular events. See also, 'the big one' and various theories around it.
Somewhat offtopic curiosity: Is there anything that Japanese fishkeepers do to keep the water and livestock inside the tank during earthquakes? Here we have no such risk for earthquakes, so a 600lb tank of water 4ft off the ground isn't much of an issue, even when bumped. I'd imagine earthquakes of this frequency could complicate that.
I have a 60L fish tank in my Tokyo apartment on around the 10th floor. It's sitting on stand that is not bolted to the wall. I have several friends with similar setups.
In the last 6 years there have been two or three earthquakes that caused enough water to slosh on to the floor.
Of those only the 2021 Fukushima earthquake caused any fish to slosh out - perhaps 10 medaka if I recall correctly. Luckily I was home and I was able to save all the fish, however there was one adult red cherry shrimp that didn't make it because I had trouble picking it up off the floor. I cleaned up the water with some paper towels and it didn't seem to cause any lasting damage.
I think if I had a 600 lb (270L?) tank or expensive fish though I would probably have a different perspective.
> The Japanese government set up a task force at the crisis management center in the prime minister's office at 11:16 p.m. on Monday in response to the earthquake.
A thousand Naruto shadow-clones just got deployed. I'm not being cute, these guys are heroes and role-models to all.
(Thanks for the link - we've since merged the threads to a submission of that one. I've included the other major links that people have been posting in the toptext.)
I assume that movie is for Japanese civil servants like the show Silicon Valley is for programmers. Stuff like the repeated meeting-room changes for no apparent reason reads as too specific and weird to be made-up.
It is a kid's show. The main characters' outfit is modelled after Japan's iconic recovery workers (stark orange and blue), a compliment of their heroics echoed in fiction.
This character can clone himself hundreds times to help others, with art often mirroring the thousands of recovery workers seen in actual event footage.
My comment intended to link back the image of childhood heroes as corporeal selfless adults
It's a technique to temporarily make one or more duplicates of your body which can move independently and have your memories/abilities. A strong enough hit will dispel them, or the user can do it manually, after which the memories of what the clones did return to the user.
The usage here by GP might just be because everyone looks/is-dressed the same and is working in unison, and since they're Japanese, anime comes to mind. In the show, Naruto often uses shadow clones to pull off more complex techniques, throwing himself, having them take turns punching/kicking, or in the case of the rasengan he divides the work of controlling the ball of chakra since he struggled to do it successfully by himself.
Today I got served this video "Earthquake and Liquefaction his Urayasu, Chiba 3/11/2011" [0], which is from the earthquake which caused the huge tsunami in Japan.
Terrifying. I know that Japan is earthquake-proofing its architecture but how about the underground infra? Do they have to dig and redo the pipes? The cables seem to be mostly overground (at least in this video) and are probably easier to repair (oldschool infra ftw).
The flood videos of towns, cars, and people being violently washed away are way scarier IMO.
Urayasu looks built on the water and all I see in the linked video is a threshold condition where the water is just barely peeking up through the ground below. People are still walking around, cars driving. There are far more chaotic and destructive scenes on youtube from that tsunami.
Different kinds of scary. The tsunami is clearly more dangerous as an actual threat, but it basically looks and works like a flood. This is a pretty familiar threat.
We think the ground is familiar too. So watching it change into something else, a squirming alien beast, is a different kind of fear. It violates your assumptions about what is safe, about what is possible at all.
Your comment prompted me to go read about epicenters and I learned something new. The hypocenter of an earthquake is apparently the point of origin of the earthquake and the epicenter is the point on the earth's surface directly above the hypocenter. Had never heard of a hypocenter before.
I didn't know about hypocenter before too but it's neat how you can sometimes deduce the meaning of a word from its parts (because "hypo" means "under"/"below" in Greek, like in hypodermic, hypoglycaemia, etc).
The class wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped, in part because it seemed to attract older kids hoping for an easy grade, but in my high school we had an etymology class.
(My school also offered Latin, but etymology seemed a much more direct/easier way to get the same basics. I just wish someone had taught me about demographics so I would have taken Spanish instead of German.)
Basically every language works that way? You can say underquake in English if you like, doesn't have to be Greek. In fact, it might make sense to pick a widely understood language rather than one with ~13 million speakers
Is 1 meter bad? In context it seems to be missing what kind of waves normally hit the coast line, and what kind tide differences exist, and what the current water level is when the wave hit.
What is a typical maximum wave height during hurricane seasons in north of japan?
Apparently 2 meters is : A 2 meters (6 ft 7 in) high tsunami hit Chiba Prefecture about 2+1⁄2 hours after the quake, causing heavy damage to cities such as Asahi. (Tohoku 2011) [1]
WRT comparison with hurricane waves, I assume they carry a lot less energy than tsunami's, because they are "superficial waves" - caused by the friction of the wind on the water - whereas a tsunami wave is caused by the movement of a huge mass of mater.
People vastly underestimate the danger of a moving body of water in general, but especially when that water is where it isn't normally. Even a relatively tame storm surge picks up sewage, dangerous chemicals, debris, and confused wild animals.
When I was in japan the earthquakes were oddly exciting rather than scary, had three different ones while I was there that visibly shook rather heavy objects around. Two being in a building and one outside.
It was rather interesting seeing things shift around leaving a permanent imprint that there was in-fact an earthquake and it wasn't some kind of illusion when earthquakes these size couple of decades ago would cause non zero amount of damage.
Although, I am scared for tokyo about the predicted earthquake that would push all these systems near the breaking point and even beyond it, but hopefully the past in not prediction of the feature and instead it'll just be a lot of smaller earthquakes.
I was secretly hoping for a 'proper' earthquake when I was living in Japan. Obviously I didn't want anybody to get hurt or anything to get damaged, but I only ever got to feel a few ~M3 earthquakes which were just slight bumps I felt when laying in bed.
Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction. Things I had taken for granted all my life suddenly became un-anchored and as a result so did I. I have never felt an actual feeling of panic that threatened to overwhelm me before that happened and it was a very mild earthquake. I had to really force myself to calm down and stay rational and do what was the safest rather than to give in to the 'flee' reflex.
The problem with earthquakes is when they start you know you're in one but you have no idea where you're headed, whether this is as bad as it gets or whether you're going to end up in a pile of collapsed rubble and what is the best decision greatly hinges on something you can't know ahead of time, which is the peak magnitude and the kind of earthquake you are experiencing.
> Things I had taken for granted all my life suddenly became un-anchored and as a result so did I.
Same for me. If you don’t grow up with a number of small regular quakes or live in high-rise building that sways with the wind, it’s pretty unsettling to feel, what you always know as stable hard ground, solid buildings all of the sudden bouncing around. Rationally you know what it is and how it works but it’s still scary.
99% of your problem can be solved by studying statistics for your area, and having a plan... So that you aren't just at the whims of the moment when it's actually happening.
What kinds of statistics is it that one should study?
Having a bugout bag and emergency supplies and water on hand is a reasonable idea everyone with the means ought to do; it's a good thing to not have to depend on gov't intervention (not because of a lack of trust, but because the general public will, and the potential for mob situations is high).
But what should I have read about to know what to do? Topological maps and flood planes?
I always was in one of the major cities so I had full confidence in them. Lacking the natural fear of death probably has something to do with it as well.
What seems to matter greatly how affect someone is by an earthquake, seems to also be related to how used people are to being unbalanced. I was once with a group of friends who most of them were skaters and snowboarders, so used to thinking about balance and being in situations where they can't do much about it, standing on relatively unbalanced things. During the earthquake, similarly to parent, most of them were fascinated, while the non-skaters quickly panicked and threw themselves on the ground.
Of course, just an anecdote, and those people could also have a general lack of fear of death, but the difference between the two of you made me think of the event again.
Well you actually bring up a very good point, people who do extreme things know full well that one mistake and they can hit their head and never walk again, feeling the same fear while knowing that you are not in any danger is what creates excitement in a way.
I lived in California for a while. I’ve always found earthquakes exciting. Probably because I trust the building codes and the ones I experienced were pretty mild.
...THIS IS A TSUNAMI INFORMATION STATEMENT FOR ALASKA, BRITISH
COLUMBIA, WASHINGTON, OREGON AND CALIFORNIA...
EVALUATION
----------
* There is no tsunami danger for the U.S. West Coast, British
Columbia, or Alaska.
* Based on earthquake information and historic tsunami records,
the earthquake is not expected to generate a tsunami.
* An earthquake has occurred with parameters listed below.
PRELIMINARY EARTHQUAKE PARAMETERS
---------------------------------
* The following parameters are based on a rapid preliminary
assessment of the earthquake and changes may occur.
* Magnitude 7.6
* Origin Time 0515 AKST Dec 08 2025
0615 PST Dec 08 2025
1415 UTC Dec 08 2025
* Coordinates 41.0 North 142.3 East
* Depth 32 miles
* Location in the Hokkaido, Japan region
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND NEXT UPDATE
--------------------------------------
* Refer to the internet site tsunami.gov for more information.
* Pacific coastal regions outside California, Oregon, Washington,
British Columbia, and Alaska should refer to the Pacific Tsunami
Warning Center messages at tsunami.gov.
* This will be the only U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center
message issued for this event unless additional information
becomes available.
Does anyone else find the way of using tsunami.gov totally baffling? It tells the user almost nothing, and the target of all the hrefs for the supposed messages listed in the map is just the tsunami.gov homepage again. The entire above-the-fold is occupied by the map, and the map tells the user nothing.
It has recently been a 4th degree one at Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the North of Spain. One of the least probable places you would even think of have an earthquake...
To think that these are happening more and more around the world and the USA just lost 9 detection stations near Alaska because of NOAA budget cuts. There was also the giant tsunami in the middle of nowhere this year.
That's the nice thing about completely unsubstantiated, baseless claims on the Internet, if it ever happens, you can always point at it like you're Nostradamus.
My predictions:
Actual zombie president in 2044.
New COVID in 2061.
Dinosaurs come back in 2123, reveal they've been steadily populating hidden Nazi underground bunkers and have declared peace with the yeti.
Was in a hotel in Sapporo, almost got thrown out of bed. Lot of people in the hotel lobby now.
Considering leaving Hokkaido by air if a Hokkaido and Sanriku Subsequent Earthquake Advisory is issued, don't really want to be in a potential megaquake.
People were freaking about the July megaquake prophecy and nothing happened. Trying to time it is silly, just chill and enjoy your stay, you'll probably be fine.
Good luck, the Sapporo Chitose airport is closed for inspection of both runways.
BTW, you are safer in hotel than outside. No need to stay in lobby, go to bed, just protect your head. I experienced much bigger one in Sapporo in 2018.
I’m curious, how is it more safer inside a building than being outside?
Modern buildings like hotels are built to withstand earthquakes of some magnitudes. Wouldn't count on that at a local construction site or a worn down house you might pass on the street.
Buildings are built to resist earthquakes. Outside, anything (electric poles, roof tiles...) can fall on you.
Shards of glass falling from ten stories up would be one of the main things to try to avoid.
Best of luck!
Official map with wave observations: https://www.jma.go.jp/bosai/map.html#5/33.909/141.192/&conte...
0.7m observed about 40 minutes ago.
This would be the tenth major earthquake (7+ magnitude) along the Pacific ring of fire this year.
With the Kamchatka and other earthquakes in the news recently I had a fear that were building to some major event but turns out that this year is about average if not slightly below average for major quakes along the ring of fire.
I heard that smaller (relative) earthquakes actually lower the prob of larger ones, so maybe it is a good thing? A bunch of 7.X earthquakes in the ocean are not going to be hugely destructive.
On the one hand earthquakes remove tension from the earth’s crust and release energy that can’t be used in future shocks.
On the other hand, if a shock doesn’t release all energy it may come to rest in a relatively weak spot that will soon give away again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_swarm: “The Matsushiro swarm lasted from 1965 to 1967 and generated about 1 million earthquakes. This swarm had the peculiarity of being sited just under a seismological observatory installed in 1947 in a decommissioned military tunnel. It began in August 1965 with three earthquakes too weak to be felt, but three months later, a hundred earthquakes could be felt daily. On 17 April 1966, the observatory counted 6,780 earthquakes, with 585 of them having a magnitude great enough to be felt, which means that an earthquake could be felt, on average, every two and a half minutes.”)
Because of that, I think an earthquake will increase the probability of one occurring again soon, but decrease its strength.
> A bunch of 7.X earthquakes in the ocean are not going to be hugely destructive.
New Zealand’s 5th most deadly disaster was Christchurch’s 6.2 which killed 185 people. It was a shallow aftershock from a larger, less destructive quake.
The damage was huge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake
The key phrase in the parent is “in the ocean”
Leading Sarah Wynn-Williams to decide Facebook was a great idea, to be able to contact people in an emergency, later got dissuaded, wrote a book https://www.amazon.com/Careless-People-Cautionary-Power-Idea...
Almost all energy released in earthquakes is released in the biggest ones. No realistic number of smaller quakes is ever going to add up to even the single biggest earthquake ever recorded.
That's correct, if relatively small earthquakes would stop that could be the precursor to a much bigger one. It's like releasing tension gradually rather than all at once.
Isn’t that a myth? Do you have any sources to back up your claim?
This type of argument is kind of logical but not so immediately useful. Earthquakes just happen and no one is involved in that process. There could still be the big one coming, or that one might have been defused by this one. No one knows.
Seems like it, & each rank is 30x more energy than the last[1]
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-a-fore... Suggests 5% for larger quake to follow within week. But overall most sources I could find suggested it's hard to know, needs more research
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10wecl8/do_litt...
Various scientists in this video. The video is a great watch btw.
https://youtu.be/HBluLfX2F_k
(stresses build up and are often released through many small, unfelt earthquakes (25:54). If these small movements don't dissipate the stress, it can accumulate and lead to a powerful chain reaction (26:25) * disclaimer I used YouTube's built-in AI to find/summarize the timestamps, as I couldn't remember offhand where it was when I previously watched this.
I don't believe the video quite says this (I watched the relevant section).
It's worth noting that they are mostly interested in critical phenomena in general, and earthquakes are kind of a drive-by application, treated along with fires and sand piles.
They do hint around the edges, but they don't head-on make the claim for earthquakes that small EQs materially lessen stress buildup and thereby make larger EQ's less likely.
I was looking for a credential of one of the people they interview, to see if they are really a solid earth person or more of a critical phenomena person -- their names aren't easy to find. This particular myth ("small earthquakes relieve stress") is a bit of a stinker in the solid earth community, and I think a solid earth person would be quite careful about their words as they discuss this.
https://www.geo.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/en/new-study-connects-ear...
I think you intended this to be a validation of the idea that small quakes relieve stress and therefore lower the chance of a large quake.
The above link does not answer that question. It is relating stress release to "fault strength", or the maximum shear stress that can be withstood by the fault. There is an incidental relationship with depth that plays a role.
The video linked nearby (on criticality) also does not address the question at issue.
I'm only replying because I work adjacent to this area, and my understanding is that the idea that small EQ's release stress is a myth. Here [1] is another link, listed as #1 in the "Myths" category. And you can dig up quotes from none other than Lucy Jones [2] saying that this is a myth.
I don't work directly in this area, so I'm not willing to say absolutely no. But I'd really like to see a head-on reference supporting the claim that it's not a myth.
[1] https://earthquakes.berkeley.edu/outreach/faq.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Jones
https://news.caloes.ca.gov/earthquake-myths-separating-fact-...
Myth 5 is "Small Earthquakes Relieve Pressure and Prevent Larger Ones"
GP is correct; I'm not sure why CA gov is calling that a myth (it's not). However keep in mind that it's not necessarily true 100% of the time. Or at least the things it might seem to imply at first glance aren't true - the presence or absence of small quakes in a given period doesn't necessarily tell you anything useful about the future.
Indeed. But I get why people are confused because it is a subtle difference between 'stress relieved through small earthquakes is stress expended' vs 'stress relieved through small earth quakes is not indicative of the magnitude of future events'.
The long term absence of stress relief small quakes on a known fault line might be bad news, or no news at all, statistics are where the difference is here, not in particular events. See also, 'the big one' and various theories around it.
Myth: new knowledge never trumps old knowledge. Check the dates on those two publications.
That is correct, but OTOH there was a 7.3 foreshock two days before the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake.
So the only thing we can say for sure is that it is still extremely difficult to predict earthquakes.
It's probably related to a phenomenon we're not yet aware of.
It's probably not.
Like?
Alien invasion
Somewhat offtopic curiosity: Is there anything that Japanese fishkeepers do to keep the water and livestock inside the tank during earthquakes? Here we have no such risk for earthquakes, so a 600lb tank of water 4ft off the ground isn't much of an issue, even when bumped. I'd imagine earthquakes of this frequency could complicate that.
I have a 60L fish tank in my Tokyo apartment on around the 10th floor. It's sitting on stand that is not bolted to the wall. I have several friends with similar setups.
In the last 6 years there have been two or three earthquakes that caused enough water to slosh on to the floor.
Of those only the 2021 Fukushima earthquake caused any fish to slosh out - perhaps 10 medaka if I recall correctly. Luckily I was home and I was able to save all the fish, however there was one adult red cherry shrimp that didn't make it because I had trouble picking it up off the floor. I cleaned up the water with some paper towels and it didn't seem to cause any lasting damage.
I think if I had a 600 lb (270L?) tank or expensive fish though I would probably have a different perspective.
NHK (english): https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20251209_02/
> The Japanese government set up a task force at the crisis management center in the prime minister's office at 11:16 p.m. on Monday in response to the earthquake.
A thousand Naruto shadow-clones just got deployed. I'm not being cute, these guys are heroes and role-models to all.
(Thanks for the link - we've since merged the threads to a submission of that one. I've included the other major links that people have been posting in the toptext.)
I’m imagining the folks from Shin Godzilla.
I assume that movie is for Japanese civil servants like the show Silicon Valley is for programmers. Stuff like the repeated meeting-room changes for no apparent reason reads as too specific and weird to be made-up.
What's a Naruto shadow clone? Google hits are just about a kids show.
It is a kid's show. The main characters' outfit is modelled after Japan's iconic recovery workers (stark orange and blue), a compliment of their heroics echoed in fiction.
This character can clone himself hundreds times to help others, with art often mirroring the thousands of recovery workers seen in actual event footage.
My comment intended to link back the image of childhood heroes as corporeal selfless adults
It's a technique to temporarily make one or more duplicates of your body which can move independently and have your memories/abilities. A strong enough hit will dispel them, or the user can do it manually, after which the memories of what the clones did return to the user.
The usage here by GP might just be because everyone looks/is-dressed the same and is working in unison, and since they're Japanese, anime comes to mind. In the show, Naruto often uses shadow clones to pull off more complex techniques, throwing himself, having them take turns punching/kicking, or in the case of the rasengan he divides the work of controlling the ball of chakra since he struggled to do it successfully by himself.
That is the reference
The Wikipedia redirect is apparently dead (https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Shadow_clone&redirect=no) and the main page for Naruto doesn't show anything about shadow clones.
Care to explain the reference? Do people dress up like a character from the TV show and help out people or what's going on?
It's an ability from the show: https://naruto.fandom.com/wiki/Shadow_Clone_Technique.
Today I got served this video "Earthquake and Liquefaction his Urayasu, Chiba 3/11/2011" [0], which is from the earthquake which caused the huge tsunami in Japan.
I have rarely seen something as scary as this.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGblnPeOXJg
Terrifying. I know that Japan is earthquake-proofing its architecture but how about the underground infra? Do they have to dig and redo the pipes? The cables seem to be mostly overground (at least in this video) and are probably easier to repair (oldschool infra ftw).
The flood videos of towns, cars, and people being violently washed away are way scarier IMO.
Urayasu looks built on the water and all I see in the linked video is a threshold condition where the water is just barely peeking up through the ground below. People are still walking around, cars driving. There are far more chaotic and destructive scenes on youtube from that tsunami.
Different kinds of scary. The tsunami is clearly more dangerous as an actual threat, but it basically looks and works like a flood. This is a pretty familiar threat.
We think the ground is familiar too. So watching it change into something else, a squirming alien beast, is a different kind of fear. It violates your assumptions about what is safe, about what is possible at all.
I remember it, as it was unfolding live on tv. I've never seen anything as brutal as that tsunami, in terms of a natural catastrophe.
Did the title of the page change as only advisories are shown on the map. A warning is a very specific thing where the tsunami was seen and is coming.
Epicentre very deep underground, so shouldn’t be dangerous aside from small tsunamis.
Your comment prompted me to go read about epicenters and I learned something new. The hypocenter of an earthquake is apparently the point of origin of the earthquake and the epicenter is the point on the earth's surface directly above the hypocenter. Had never heard of a hypocenter before.
I didn't know about hypocenter before too but it's neat how you can sometimes deduce the meaning of a word from its parts (because "hypo" means "under"/"below" in Greek, like in hypodermic, hypoglycaemia, etc).
The class wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped, in part because it seemed to attract older kids hoping for an easy grade, but in my high school we had an etymology class.
(My school also offered Latin, but etymology seemed a much more direct/easier way to get the same basics. I just wish someone had taught me about demographics so I would have taken Spanish instead of German.)
Basically every language works that way? You can say underquake in English if you like, doesn't have to be Greek. In fact, it might make sense to pick a widely understood language rather than one with ~13 million speakers
Gojira kimasu.
https://www.tsunami.gov/?p=PHEB/2025/12/08/25342050/2/WEPA40
Shouldn't be too bad; USGS forecasts up to 1 meter tsunami.
Nhk has some more information - looks like the areas hardest hit will have been hit by now, with 3m high waves:
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/weather-disaster/tsu...
No, estimated height has nothing to do with actual measurements
Can you elaborate?
1 meter is bad. That's a lot of water full of things you don't want slamming into you or any structure. Then it comes back full of even worse things.
Is 1 meter bad? In context it seems to be missing what kind of waves normally hit the coast line, and what kind tide differences exist, and what the current water level is when the wave hit.
What is a typical maximum wave height during hurricane seasons in north of japan?
Apparently 2 meters is : A 2 meters (6 ft 7 in) high tsunami hit Chiba Prefecture about 2+1⁄2 hours after the quake, causing heavy damage to cities such as Asahi. (Tohoku 2011) [1]
WRT comparison with hurricane waves, I assume they carry a lot less energy than tsunami's, because they are "superficial waves" - caused by the friction of the wind on the water - whereas a tsunami wave is caused by the movement of a huge mass of mater.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
People vastly underestimate the danger of a moving body of water in general, but especially when that water is where it isn't normally. Even a relatively tame storm surge picks up sewage, dangerous chemicals, debris, and confused wild animals.
better link: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000rtdt...
(originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193413 but we've merged the threads)
When I was in japan the earthquakes were oddly exciting rather than scary, had three different ones while I was there that visibly shook rather heavy objects around. Two being in a building and one outside.
It was rather interesting seeing things shift around leaving a permanent imprint that there was in-fact an earthquake and it wasn't some kind of illusion when earthquakes these size couple of decades ago would cause non zero amount of damage.
Although, I am scared for tokyo about the predicted earthquake that would push all these systems near the breaking point and even beyond it, but hopefully the past in not prediction of the feature and instead it'll just be a lot of smaller earthquakes.
I was secretly hoping for a 'proper' earthquake when I was living in Japan. Obviously I didn't want anybody to get hurt or anything to get damaged, but I only ever got to feel a few ~M3 earthquakes which were just slight bumps I felt when laying in bed.
Funny, I had the exact opposite reaction. Things I had taken for granted all my life suddenly became un-anchored and as a result so did I. I have never felt an actual feeling of panic that threatened to overwhelm me before that happened and it was a very mild earthquake. I had to really force myself to calm down and stay rational and do what was the safest rather than to give in to the 'flee' reflex.
The problem with earthquakes is when they start you know you're in one but you have no idea where you're headed, whether this is as bad as it gets or whether you're going to end up in a pile of collapsed rubble and what is the best decision greatly hinges on something you can't know ahead of time, which is the peak magnitude and the kind of earthquake you are experiencing.
> Things I had taken for granted all my life suddenly became un-anchored and as a result so did I.
Same for me. If you don’t grow up with a number of small regular quakes or live in high-rise building that sways with the wind, it’s pretty unsettling to feel, what you always know as stable hard ground, solid buildings all of the sudden bouncing around. Rationally you know what it is and how it works but it’s still scary.
99% of your problem can be solved by studying statistics for your area, and having a plan... So that you aren't just at the whims of the moment when it's actually happening.
What kinds of statistics is it that one should study?
Having a bugout bag and emergency supplies and water on hand is a reasonable idea everyone with the means ought to do; it's a good thing to not have to depend on gov't intervention (not because of a lack of trust, but because the general public will, and the potential for mob situations is high).
But what should I have read about to know what to do? Topological maps and flood planes?
I always was in one of the major cities so I had full confidence in them. Lacking the natural fear of death probably has something to do with it as well.
What seems to matter greatly how affect someone is by an earthquake, seems to also be related to how used people are to being unbalanced. I was once with a group of friends who most of them were skaters and snowboarders, so used to thinking about balance and being in situations where they can't do much about it, standing on relatively unbalanced things. During the earthquake, similarly to parent, most of them were fascinated, while the non-skaters quickly panicked and threw themselves on the ground.
Of course, just an anecdote, and those people could also have a general lack of fear of death, but the difference between the two of you made me think of the event again.
I ski. Responding to being out of balance is just automatic, it doesn't come from needing to think about it.
It is a transferable skill. Have tried ice skating twice, could just do it fine.
Well you actually bring up a very good point, people who do extreme things know full well that one mistake and they can hit their head and never walk again, feeling the same fear while knowing that you are not in any danger is what creates excitement in a way.
I knew a woman like that.
I lived in California for a while. I’ve always found earthquakes exciting. Probably because I trust the building codes and the ones I experienced were pretty mild.
In case the site gets hugged to death:
https://www.tsunami.gov/events/PAAQ/2025/12/08/t6yfla/1/WEAK...
WEAK53 PAAQ 081430 TIBAK1
Tsunami Information Statement Number 1
NWS National Tsunami Warning Center Palmer AK
630 AM PST Mon Dec 8 2025
...THIS IS A TSUNAMI INFORMATION STATEMENT FOR ALASKA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, WASHINGTON, OREGON AND CALIFORNIA...
EVALUATION
----------
* There is no tsunami danger for the U.S. West Coast, British Columbia, or Alaska.
* Based on earthquake information and historic tsunami records, the earthquake is not expected to generate a tsunami.
* An earthquake has occurred with parameters listed below.
PRELIMINARY EARTHQUAKE PARAMETERS
---------------------------------
* The following parameters are based on a rapid preliminary assessment of the earthquake and changes may occur.
* Magnitude 7.6
* Origin Time 0515 AKST Dec 08 2025 0615 PST Dec 08 2025 1415 UTC Dec 08 2025
* Coordinates 41.0 North 142.3 East
* Depth 32 miles
* Location in the Hokkaido, Japan region
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND NEXT UPDATE
--------------------------------------
* Refer to the internet site tsunami.gov for more information.
* Pacific coastal regions outside California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska should refer to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center messages at tsunami.gov.
* This will be the only U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center message issued for this event unless additional information becomes available.
$$
(originally posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193413 but we've merged the threads)
Does anyone else find the way of using tsunami.gov totally baffling? It tells the user almost nothing, and the target of all the hrefs for the supposed messages listed in the map is just the tsunami.gov homepage again. The entire above-the-fold is occupied by the map, and the map tells the user nothing.
The map has pins for events. At this moment there is one off Japan and one off Alaska.
anyone able to ping this to the lads at the National Design Studio?
Does anyone has information if any prefecture got hit by big waves? If none, how much time usually before the warnings are lifted?
0.3-1m.
Damn. That sounds bad. Hope it didn't trigger a tsunami.
I guess we'll know, soon.
Felt it in Tokyo. It was a quite solid shake, and lasted a minute or two.
It has recently been a 4th degree one at Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the North of Spain. One of the least probable places you would even think of have an earthquake...
Unfortunately Spain and Portugal have seen quite a few earthquakes over the centuries, some of them quite deadly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Spain
There may be a new subduction zone forming in the Atlantic off the coast there.
This all happens in geologic slow motion, of course.
https://www.livescience.com/37418-subduction-zone-forming-of...
The updated IGN website doesnt work properly for me. The old site was so much better, do you know if there is an alternative?
Is it so serious? It was extremely deep, normally that's not as strong, right?
To think that these are happening more and more around the world and the USA just lost 9 detection stations near Alaska because of NOAA budget cuts. There was also the giant tsunami in the middle of nowhere this year.
https://www.alaskasnewssource.com/2025/11/01/state-seismolog...
We're seeing the buildup for a 9+ megathrust earthquake.
That's completely unsupported speculation.
How do you know?
If it happens today, OP is right, and if it happens in a century they are too.
What about if its in a millenium?
That's the nice thing about completely unsubstantiated, baseless claims on the Internet, if it ever happens, you can always point at it like you're Nostradamus.
My predictions:
Actual zombie president in 2044.
New COVID in 2061.
Dinosaurs come back in 2123, reveal they've been steadily populating hidden Nazi underground bunkers and have declared peace with the yeti.
I've connected the dots.