tsunami

Japan: Undersea quake causes minor tsunami Japan’s northern shores were hit by a minor tsunami on Monday night as a strong undersea earthquake struck off the coast, in the same area that was annihilated in the killer tsunami of 2011. A 20 centimetres (eight inches) wave was recorded in Kuji, eastern Iwate, at 9:07 am (0007 GMT), although way below the possible one metre (3.3 feet) tsunami that the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) had warned about. The agency warned that waters were still on a slight rise in Kuji, although ruling out any danger of their swelling too much further. Along other parts of the coastline of Iwate prefecture, waves of up to 10 centimetres were recorded. Aerial footage showed no perceptible rise in sea level along the coast, and there were no immediate reports of damage or casualties reported. Nor was any visible change at the ports in the area noticed, where the nation’s national broadcaster NHK has permanently stationed cameras. As per the JMA, the undersea earthquake of magnitude 6.9 struck at 8:06 am in the Pacific some 210 kilometres (130 miles) east of Miyako, at a depth of 10 kilometres. At a Tokyo news conference, an official shared that geologists regard the quake as an aftershock of the 2011 earthquake. As per NHK reports, evacuation advisories were sent to more than 19,000 people by local authorities in Iwate. Massive chunks of areas of the coastline covered by the advisory were wrecked in the 2011 quake and tsunami, which had left in its wake, more than 18,000 people dead and a consequent nuclear accident in Fukushima. The infamous 9.0 undersea quake had set off a gigantic tsunami that had swamped cooling systems at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, sparking the worst atomic accident in a generation. The catastrophe, which completes four year this March 11, still looms large in the Japanese psyche for the loss of life and destruction it had wrought, pulling up the country's preparedness in the face of danger. Japan is geographically located at the conjunction of several tectonic plates, leaving it exposed to around a fifth of the world's most powerful quakes every year. Years of such natural cataclysms has left the country with stringent building codes, such that can withstand powerful earthquakes capable of razing cities in other countries to the ground.