Tsunami

On Friday, March 11, 2011 at 2:46 in the afternoon the largest earthquake to ever strike Japan will send yet another huge tsunami this way. That tsunami will wipe Owada-san’s fortress of a house off its perch like a bulldozer knocking down a birdcage. It will destroy not only Owada-san’s house, but also the houses of all her neighbors. And their neighbors. And their neighbors, and their neighbors. It will destroy the cleaners, the lumber mill, the station, the Post Office, the gas station down the road and almost every other building in town, leaving one city official to remark, “The city of Rikuzen Takata no longer exists.” The tsunami will literally wipe the entire town off the map, leaving nothing but rubble stretching six kilometers inland—unbelievable heaps of cars, trucks, rail road ties and rails, railroad cars, bridges, and entire homes twisted and bent and lying in crumpled heaps kilometers from where they had stood. Eighty percent of the city’s 8000 houses will be washed away. It will be 72 hours before any rescue workers are able to approach the area, and early reports will indicate that 20% to 40% of the city’s population has died, with several of the city’s designated tsunami safety areas inundated and 10,000 of the city’s 23,000 people still unaccounted for as of March 20—nine days after the disaster.

By April 3 the actual casualty count will have been reduced to 1,000 confirmed dead and 1,300 still missing. This is still an astounding 10% of the city’s population, and it’s unlikely that any of the 1,300 still missing will ever be found.

The tsunami caused by the 2004 Sumatra earthquake ultimately took 227,000 to 240,000 lives. Here again, the disparity is striking as well as frustrating. Thirteen thousand human beings either died or they didn’t. But whatever the figure, only 170,000 bodies were ever found. Up to seventy-thousand more were washed out to sea forever. Doubtless, the same thing will have happened here, though thankfully not in the same huge numbers.

Over the past 20 years the Japanese government has poured billions of dollars worth of yen into infrastructure construction for tsunami protection. Almost none of it will prove effective here. Ofunato will be almost completely destroyed for the fourth time since 1896 when a tsunami as high as 25 meters killed 27,000 people in this coastal area. In 1933 a tsunami caused by an 8.4 magnitude earthquake hit this area and killed 1,522 people. The Chile tsunami hit in 1960, and there is a marker on the ground in Ofunato indicating the highest reaches of that wave. The 2011 tsunami will run several kilometers past that marker. In fact, markers all about the area warn of tsunami dangers. Some date back to 600 years ago. Some advise not to build below the line of where they stand. Most just say to be prepared. They serve as ancient reminders, many of which will be completely inundated.

A wave ten meters high will rush over the seawall at Ofunato, pick up hundreds of logs resting on the docks awaiting shipment, and send them like battering rams throughout the city, shattering everything in their paths. The hotel you stayed in last night will remain standing, but ruined. Sandwich Bar Sanen, where you read Sad Book last night, will be completely demolished along with every other building within 50 meters of it. Nothing of the industrial complex across the harbor will remain but cold, hard, apocalyptic skeletons of steel.

Large parts of Kamaishi will be destroyed. A 97 meter long cargo ship, Asia Symphony, weighing 6,175 tons will be tossed onto the dock there like it was nothing but a toy in the bathtub. Its 17 man Philippine crew will end up in a Kamaishi refugee shelter. A smaller boat will be perched on top of a three-story building near the harbor In Kamaishi, though only the skeleton of the building will remain beneath it, stuffed to the ribcage with flotsam and trash. A sightseeing ferry will have come to rest on the top of a two story building in Otsuchi in Iwate Prefecture and photos of it will swamp the Internet. The ferry will be bigger than the building it perches on. Here in Rikuzen Takata, nothing will remain but the stark skeletons of three or four concrete buildings. Three weeks after the tsunami, when you finally return here, it will look like a war zone. There will be almost nothing left standing from here all the way to the junior high school where you met the little boy this morning. It will all be gone, or all ruined, or all left in the mud to be shoveled up and hauled away. It will look like a garbage dump on a magnificent scale. It will look like an unthinkable scene from a watery hell.

And these are scenes that will repeat themselves over and over again along this northern coastline. Onagawa will be destroyed. Otsuchi will be destroyed. Soma will be destroyed. Minamirikuzen will be destroyed. Ishinomaki will be destroyed. Parts of Miyako will be destroyed. So will parts of Kesennuma, and parts of Natori, including Sendai Airport, along with countless other areas.

The municipality of Taro, which is a part of the city of Miyako in Iwate Prefecture, with 4,648 residents, has one of the largest seawalls in the world. It’s 10 meters high and two kilometers long. It’s designed to divert tsunami waves towards the mountains and away from the town. In 2011 it will be hit by a wave of dirty seawater 15 meters high that will rush right over it. That wave will have a 37.8 meters high run up, caused largely because the great seawall designed to keep it out will ultimately serve to keep it in and allow it to churn back and forth across the valley, and for those who don’t yet know the metric system, 37.8 meters is the height of a 12 story building! It’s 124 feet, not to suggest that many people in the world have any idea how long a foot is, but . . . A one hundred and twenty-four foot high wave is high enough to drown the life out of anybody who doesn’t start running for higher ground the instant he feels the earth start to move, and that’s exactly what it will do. Most residents of Taro will miraculously survive—they will have had their annual tsunami drill just one week earlier, in fact—but many will be caught in a traffic jam on the main street of the little municipality when the wave comes crashing over the wall, either reluctant to get out of their cars and run, or unable to.

By one professor’s measurement, this 37.8 meter high wave will be the highest tsunami wave to ever hit Japan. And still another professor will measure a wave run up height of 38.9 meters at another location in the same city of Miyako. If correct, that one will be the winner of the big wave contest. Others will continue to call the 38.2 meter high wave at Ofunato in 1896 the highest ever, saying the highest wave of 2011 arrived at the same spot in Ofunato, but only rose 30 meters high. Whatever. And whoever is correct, the hundreds of dead people in Ofunato will be just as dead. And so will those in Taro. There will be nothing left of the place but the survivors who will have had the sense to do what they’ve been taught their entire lives—to “keep their shoes nearby, leave with the first shudder of the earthquake, and know the path to high ground in the dark.”

In Rikuzen Takata, again, it will be 72 hours after the earthquake before rescue workers will finally arrive. That will be too long for anybody to have possibly survived in the rubble.

The first indications of a tsunami hitting the shore will occur at 2:54 near the harbor in Ofunato, just eight minutes after the earthquake strikes. Residents will have only 15 minutes after the first sensations of the earthquake to reach high ground before their little city is completely inundated. And for those who do make it to safety in those 15 minutes, it will be five full days before any rescue teams arrive. For many they will be five days without food, without bedding, without enough clothing, without heat, without their prescription medicines, and without water in many cases, except that, of course, as the old platitude goes—it could always be worse; it could be raining. In Ofunata, in Rikuzen Takata, in Kamaishi, in Kesennuma it will be snowing.

With few exceptions along the entire coast, such as a family miraculously swept several kilometers to a high perch on a mountainside in their car, where two of the five family members will die of exposure before help arrives anyway, only those who make it to the municipal safety areas will survive. And in some cases, even that won’t prove to have been enough. Thousands of people, believing they had fled to safety, will be killed as the wave rushes over them. There are 7,000 designated tsunami safety areas in Japan. In the three hardest hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima, 101 of these will be inundated. The shelters in Rikuzen Takata are designed to protect against a wave three to four meters in height. They will be ten meters too close to sea level for the wave that’s going to hit them. In Kamaishi, four of 69 sites will be hit. In Ofunato, six of 58 will be hit. In Onagawa 12 of 25 sites will be hit and destroyed—all of them more than six meters above sea level. In Minamisanriku, 31 of 80 designated sites will be struck, and according to a city official, “most of them washed away.”

Nationwide, the tsunami will claim more than 25,000 lives. Of the 13,135 bodies recovered by May, 92% will have died of drowning. Sixty-five percent of the dead will have been over 60 years old, and 24% will have been in their 70s. Because the quake will strike during school hours, only one in 47 of the dead will be school children, but at one elementary school 74 of 108 students will die along with 10 of 13 teachers. At least 82 children will lose both of their parents.

The number of dead will include two American English teachers working in Northern Japan and an American man reportedly trying to photograph the tsunami from the mouth of the Klamath River in California, where you used to work as a river guide. His body will wash up later on one of the beautiful beaches of Oregon where you used to live, some 7,300 kilometers from here.

The tsunami will inundate 470 square kilometers of Japanese land. It will destroy 47,500 buildings and damage another 150,000. It will leave 25 million tons of rubbish along the streets of Japan’s northeastern coastal towns to be dealt with. Estimates of the fiscal cost of the disaster will run to 300 billion U.S. dollars—more than three times what the 1995 Kobe earthquake cost. It will make this the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the world. Three hundred thousand people will be left homeless. Four million four hundred thousand households will be left without electricity immediately after the tsunami, and 1.5 million without water. An irrigation damn will burst, washing away 8 homes, and six other dams will be damaged. Fifteen ports on Japan’s northern Pacific coast will be closed to almost all shipping for two weeks. An estimated 90% of 29,000 fishing boats in Miyagi, Iwate, and Fukushima prefectures will be rendered useless. Seawater will inundate 23,600 hectares of farmland, mostly rice paddies, leaving deposits of salt in the soil that could affect rice crops for years, with the affected area accounting for as much as 4% of Japan’s total rice production.

Soil liquefaction will affect large areas of reclaimed land around Tokyo, destroying 30 homes and damaging another 1,046 buildings. Somehow, the earthquake will even cause a curious bend at the top of the orange Tokyo Tower that you love so much.

The entire transportation system in Tokyo and most points north of there will be down for hours. The Shinkansen from Tokyo to Aomori will be down for weeks and 1,100 sections of it will need to be repaired. There will be rolling blackouts throughout the greater Tokyo area for months because six nuclear reactors will fail due to damage caused first by the earthquake and then by the tsunami. Radiation will escape into the environment and scare the bejesus out of everybody. Traces of it will appear in the ground water, in milk, in vegetables grown nearby and in fish caught 40 kilometers out to sea. Two hundred thousand additional residents will be evacuated from the area surrounding the plants, and they may end up homeless too. People all over the world will sit in front of their television sets and shit themselves while 50 workers stay at the site of the endangered reactors to control the damage. Those 50 workers will become known as the “Fukushima Fifty.” They will be compared to the 47 Samurai of old. They will be compared to the Kamikaze pilots of WWII. The prime minister will tell the world that they are “prepared to die.” And maybe they will die eventually, but they won’t die alone. Their number will have gradually increased to 1,000 by March 22.

By the first week of May, the government will have raised the rating on the nuclear disaster to the level of the Chernobyl incident 25 years earlier, but will continue to assert that the situation is under control. At the same time, an atomic energy specialist in America will be calling it “Chernobyl on steroids.” A scientist in England will be saying that it’s going to take “50 to 100 years” just to clean up the mess. The Russian president will be angry at Japan about the radiation levels hitting his country. And nobody in Japan will have any idea what to believe. They’ll just go on with their lives and hope for the best. This has always been the Japanese way, after all. Just to persevere.

In Nagoya, when the earthquake hits, you will be sitting at Mr. Donut, at the exact table you were occupying the day before you began this trip when you got in the big brouhaha with the old ladies who didn’t want to sit next to you. There won’t be anybody sitting next to you on the day of the earthquake either. The room will begin to sway slowly, and you won’t be certain at first if it’s an earthquake or if you’re just feeling faint. One of your first thoughts will be that you haven’t eaten yet, not even a donut. But everybody in the room will have the same look of confusion on their faces, and you’ll recognize that every person couldn’t possibly be feeling faint for lack of food, or any other reason that you can think of. And soon everybody will begin to realize that it’s an earthquake, but you will be the first to say the word. You’ll catch the eye of a college student sitting, with his books open, two tables away from you—exactly where the old ladies were sitting a couple of months ago when you started upbraiding them about their thoughtless xenophobia. You’ll say “Earthquake?” The college student won’t reply. And the overwhelming thought on your mind after that will be, “Oh no. Nobody’s hand to hold.” A person who’s never experienced an earthquake will have no idea how all alone it makes one feel. Especially for one who really is all alone.

But the earthquake’s energy will have considerably dissipated by the time it reaches Nagoya, the only damage there that you will become aware of will occur in one of your favorite little restaurants down town. This is a tiny place that’s already been there forty-five years. It’s cramped and sweaty and dirty, and the mama who runs it keeps a row of dildos standing on the back of her counter. She likes to stick edo mame up her nostrils and pretends to give fellatio to men she pretends are in her kitchen. She talks dirty to everybody, including you. In fact, many of the dirty expressions you know in Japanese, you learned from her, just not well enough to use them appropriately, so you don’t. Her customers think she’s funny. You think she’s interesting. You go there because it reminds you of the 80s when you first arrived. Places like this have disappeared from the Japanese landscape faster than donuts disappear at the donut shop. This mama will already be 70 years old when the 2011 earthquake knocks the ceiling of her establishment to the floor, and she’ll close the place down. That’s the only aspect of the earthquake that will have an immediate effect on your personal lifestyle. That and your office door will begin to close with a bit of a hitch.

But what will affect you—what will affect everybody—is not the earthquake itself. It’s the tsunami the earthquake will bring.

One of the first people we are aware of to write history in an analytical way, instead of considering all acts to be those of the gods, was the Greek historian, Thucydides, who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War in the early part of the fifth century BC. He was also the first to extrapolate correctly on the cause of tsunamis. Reflecting on a 426 BC tsunami in the Maliakos Gulf, he concluded there could only be one possible cause for the phenomenon, and that cause was an undersea earthquake.

Extremely high waves can sometimes be caused by various weather conditions, though these aren’t true tsunamis. True tsunamis may, however, be caused by volcanoes as happened with Krakatau in 1883. The volcano has traditionally gotten all the press in that incident because it created the loudest noise ever recorded—it was heard 4,800 kilometers away—but the volcano only killed 2,000 people. Another 38,000 were killed by the ensuing tsunami, though here again sources vary. It may have been fewer. It may have been more. Nonetheless, most tsunamis are caused by earthquakes, and Japan has a lot of earthquakes. Many of the most destructive tsunamis in recorded history are ones that struck Japan. They occurred in 1498, 1586, 1611, 1707, 1771, 1896, and 1933. Plus there’s the 1960 tsunami that came all the way from Chile to strike Japan. And there’s the tsunami caused by a great earthquake off the British Columbia coast in 1700. There is no historical record of that in America, because the historical record hadn’t got to British Columbia yet, but geological evidence for it abounds. And the tsunami it caused in Tohoku does exist in the Japanese historical record. It sunk a rice barge and killed the crew.

The geological record shows signs of a huge tsunami here in 869. That tsunami is known to geologists as the Jogan disaster, and it’s documented in the historical record as well. It’s believed to have been created by an offshore earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 8.3, and evidence shows that it gushed more than 4 kilometers inland. There is also geological evidence of two earlier tsunamis of similar scale in the past 3,000 years. The 2011 tsunami will be yet another of these, and scientists will suggest that such tsunamis may be 1,000-year events.

In short, Japan is more familiar with tsunamis than any other place in the world. The very word, tsunami, is originally Japanese. It consists of two kanji. The first means harbor or landing. The second means wave. The word isn’t pronounced in Japanese exactly the way it is in English, however.

But for that matter, neither is karaoke.

And neither is almost any English word that was imported from Japanese, including city names like Tokyo and Kyoto. But then again, why would they be? That isn’t the way language works.

Anyway, the megathrust earthquake that will cause the 2011 tsunami will be the largest ever known to hit Japan, and one of the five largest quakes ever recorded in the world. Together, those five quakes, all at magnitude 9.0 or higher, will account for more than 50% of the total energy released by all the thousands of earthquakes occurring over the past century. With a magnitude of 9.0, it will be only one third as big as the 2004 Sumatra earthquake that caused the deadliest tsunami in history, and one fifth the size of the 1960 Great Chilean earthquake, which, with a magnitude of 9.5, remains the largest ever recorded in the world. But it will be 10,000 times bigger than the magnitude 6.3 Christchurch earthquake that will precede it by almost a month on February 21, 2011 and damage or destroy much of Christchurch, New Zealand. It will release 30 times more energy than any Japanese earthquake ever measured, including the Great Kanto earthquake that destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama in 1923. Its epicenter will be 45 kilometers east of Honshu and a relatively shallow 32 kilometers beneath the earth’s crust.

The Pacific Plate moves west at the rate of eight or nine centimeters per year, and releases energy as it slips beneath the Eurasian Plate underlying Honshu. As one plate slides under another, it tends to drag the edge of the second plate down with it along the line of the interface. A megathrust earthquake like the one that will occur off Northern Honshu in 2011 happens after hundreds of years of this tectonic subduction, when the upper plate slips free of the lower plate and bounces back up, resulting in an uplift in the seafloor above the line of the rupture. It is this kind of uplift that will cause the huge tsunami in 2011. It will raise the seabed off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture by as much as three meters. It will displace 25 cubic kilometers of seawater.

The quake will occur over a 400 to 500 kilometer long rift where this is happening. The longer the rift, the bigger the quake—the Sumatra earthquake ruptured along a 1,000 kilometer rift—but these rifts normally happen where plates interface along straight lines, and scientists don’t generally believe there is a long enough straight line off the coast of Northern Japan to allow for a 9.0 earthquake. The severity of an earthquake is in proportion not only to the length of the rupture, but rather more correctly, to its length times its width. The seabed off of Tohoku is known for megathrust earthquakes that rupture over wide areas, and the 2011 quake will rupture over a width of 300 kilometers. But the severity of the quake will take seismologists by surprise because of its unexpected length. Right now they tend to believe that an 8.5 magnitude earthquake is the largest that could possibly occur here. They’re going to find out they’re wrong.

The difference in terms of released energy between an 8.5 magnitude earthquake and a 9.0 magnitude earthquake is huge, and therefore, so is the difference in the potential for damage they can cause. An earthquake of magnitude “n” releases 31.6 times more energy than an earthquake of magnitude “n-1.” It releases (31.6 X 31.6) times more energy—1000 times more energy—than an earthquake of magnitude “n-2.” It releases 31,600 times more energy than an earthquake of magnitude “n-3.” This all looks very random, you suppose. In fact it isn’t. These are all approximations, but 31.6 is an adequate approximation for the irrational number (10 times the square root of 10), which is the same as (10 to the power of 3/2), and this is the actual number used in the equation. Yes, the moment magnitude scale looks like a simple numerical scale, but it’s actually a logarithmic scale in the disguise of a numerical one.

What?

Maybe you can put it an easier way. Though this is another approximation, every 0.2 point increase in magnitude marks a doubling in the size of the earthquake, or more correctly, a doubling in the amount of total energy it releases. Six point two is twice as big as 6.0. Six point four is four times as big as 6.0. Six point six is 8 times as big. Six point eight is 16 times as big. Seven is 32 times as big. Seven point two is 64 times as big. Seven point four is 128 times as big. Seven point six is 256 times as big. Seven point eight is 512 times as big. Eight is 1024 times as big. Eight point two is 2,048 times as big. And so on. This is only a working model, but for all practical purposes, it works just fine, and its correlation to the more complicated equation above will become more clear to readers who note how close the numbers 32 and 1024 here are to the numbers 31.6 and 1000 generated above. The latter is only a rough calculation, but for layman purposes, it works.

Of course, few people in English speaking countries have even a moderate understanding of how these numbers grow, and they don’t care what equation works. Why would they? They rarely have cause to care. Here, however, Japanese people kind of do. And adults here tend to have a basic understanding of these figures.

The coming earthquake will release a surface energy of 1.9 (0.5) X 1017 joules. Nobody who isn’t a scientist has any idea what that means, including you, but it’s a measure of the energy released in the shaking of the earth and the movement of the tsunami waves, which, by the way, can travel through deep water at speeds faster than jumbo jets fly. This will be twice as much surface energy as the 2004 Sumatra earthquake released. It will be enough energy to power the city of Nagoya for a year, and then some. The total energy the earthquake will release will be 200,000 times the surface energy—this is known to seismologists as the seismic moment. What an ominous sounding term! A seismic moment. You suspect you’ve had a few seismic moments of your own in your day. But this earthquake’s seismic moment will be enough to power the city of Nagoya for 200,000 years. It will be equivalent to roughly 600 million times the energy of the atomic bomb that exploded over Hiroshima. The good news is that only the earthquake’s surface energy will be released on the surface.

Duh?

That’s why they call it surface energy.

The rest will remain under the earth’s surface, where it belongs, and where it will dissipate into the earth’s core without causing any real damage.

It will change the shape and the elevation of Honshu, however. It will shift the island as much as 2.4 meters closer to North America in places, making it wider than it is now. It will also lower a 400 kilometer stretch of Northern Honshu’s eastern coastline by as much as 0.6 meters, and by doing so it will allow the tsunami even more room to rush over the seawalls, through the cities and across the land.

The quake will shift the earth’s axis by 25 centimeters, affecting both the length of the day and the tilt of the earth. The speed of the earth’s rotation will increase enough to shorten each day by 1.8 microseconds. As if each day isn’t way too short already. But changes like this are normal and expected for an earthquake of that size.

The earth will continue to vibrate for several weeks.

The earthquake will be preceded by several foreshocks. The largest will occur on March 9, with a magnitude of 7.2. There will be at least 22 of these greater than magnitude 5.0 before the big one hits at 2:46 on March 11. Four of them will be over magnitude 6.0.

Following the quake there will be a constant barrage of aftershocks occurring within an area of 300 by 500 kilometers surrounding the March 11 epicenter. More than 250 with magnitude of 5.0 or greater will have struck in the first 72 hours. That’s one every 17.5 minutes, several of them generating tsunami warnings of their own, thus further complicating rescue efforts. At least 45 of these aftershocks will top magnitude 6.0 and three will exceed magnitude 7.0. By May 5 the number will surpasses 1,000. Of these 63 will be over magnitude 6.0. Along with repeated video images of ugly, black, determined, and merciless water rushing over seawalls into Japanese cities from Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture in the north to Oarai, Ibaragi Prefecture in the south, carrying everything smaller than a steel and concrete buildings in its ruthless path, a terrifying graphic detailing the incidence and strength of all these seismic events will experience a viral explosion on the internet. The graphic will be accompanied by an eerie music track that sounds like a ghost movie from the 1950s, and it will show a long succession of exploding circles indicating earthquakes. The energy of the quakes will be depicted by the size of the circles and their depths will be color coded, from dark blue on the deep end, through purple, green, yellow, orange and red as the foci of the quakes become more shallow. There will be a clock in the top right corner of the graphic showing elapsed time. It will look a bit like a light show at a rock and roll concert, but what will keep viewers enthralled is not the cacophony of colors nor the size of the exploding circles, but their rapid frequency, especially in the hours immediately after the big shock of March 11.

Though the incidence and severity of these aftershocks will gradually decrease as time passes, in accordance with Omori’s Law, scientists will nonetheless expect them to continue for years. They’ll also say the occurrence of further big earthquakes at either end of 2011’s 500 kilometer rift are extremely likely.

That will be the bad news. The good news will be that those next big quakes won’t be as big as the 2011 quake. That’s because there won’t be a long enough interface remaining on either end of the rupture to allow for another huge quake. You suspect there will be some solace in that prediction for people in Hokkaido and people in the Tokyo area. Where you live in Nagoya, however, you’re not so certain the supposition applies. You in Nagoya are in front of a different fault line, created by the subduction of a different tectonic plate, and you’ll be left to keep on waiting for your own big one to strike you there, while continuing to hope that it never does.