Earth ChangesS


Alarm Clock

Meltdown 'unlikely': experts on explosion at Japan nuclear plant

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Explosion at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant
Radiation was leaking from an unstable nuclear reactor north of Tokyo on Saturday, the Japanese government said, after an explosion blew the roof off the facility following a massive earthquake. The development has led to fears of a disastrous meltdown. Here are comments from experts about what might have happened.

TIMOTHY ABRAM, PROFESSOR OF NUCLEAR FUEL TECHNOLOGY AT BRITAIN'S MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY

"By sampling the air around the station, you'd be able to tell how much radioactivity has been released. The thing they'll be looking for more than anything is whether there's any evidence of the fuel actually degrading," he told Reuters.

"If the fuel is substantially intact, then there'll be a much, much lower release of radioactivity and the explosion that's happened might be just due to a build-up of steam in the reactor circuit.

"The most probable (cause of the explosion) is the coolant, particularly if it's water, can overheat and turn to steam more rapidly than it was designed to cope with."

He said it was unlikely it would develop into anything more serious, but this would depend on the integrity of the fuel, which contains nearly all the radioactivity of the plant. He said he thought it would be "pretty unlikely" that the fuel itself had been significantly damaged.

Bizarro Earth

Japan pre-dawn quakes cause landslides in Niigata

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© UnknownThe tarmac and surrounding area of Sendai Airport is covered with water after a tsunami.
Tokyo - A strong 6.7-magnitude earthquake felt in Tokyo hit Japan's mountainous Niigata prefecture and caused landslides and avalanches at 4:00 am Saturday (1900 GMT Friday).

Kyodo News said there were no immediate reports of casualties and no fresh tsunami alert was issued after the quake, which was followed by an almost equally strong quake in the same area half an hour later.

The quakes struck in the west of the main Honshu island, on the Sea of Japan coast and far from the offshore Pacific Ocean tremor that triggered a mammoth tsunami Friday that is feared to have killed more than 1,000 people.

The focus of both predawn quakes was in central Niigata.

The US Geological Survey put the strength at 6.2 and said it hit at a depth of only one kilometre (about half a mile).

Police said they had received reports of a landslide and avalanche in Tokamachi and another avalanche in Tsunan town, Kyodo reported.

The news agency also said wooden buildings including a town hall and a garage had reportedly been destroyed and some highways cracked in the village of Sakae in Nagano prefecture.

The first quake in the inland region struck at 4:00 am Saturday (1900 GMT Friday). The focus was in central Niigata but it also shook neighbouring Nagano, and a third quake later followed in the region.

Nuke

Huge blast at Japan nuclear power plant


A massive explosion has struck a Japanese nuclear power plant after Friday's devastating earthquake.

A huge pall of smoke was seen coming from the plant at Fukushima and several workers were injured.

Japanese officials fear a meltdown at one of the plant's reactors after radioactive material was detected outside it.

A huge relief operation is under way after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami, which killed more than 600.

Hundreds more people are missing and it is feared about 1,300 may have died.

The offshore earthquake triggered a tsunami which wreaked havoc on Japan's north-east coast, sweeping far inland and devastating a number of towns and villages.

Bizarro Earth

Japan Earthquake Triggered Volcano Eruption In Russia?

Eruption
© PlanetSave
The major earthquake that hit Japan today may have just triggered some volcanoes in Russia as well. While reports are still vague on the incident, there is a strong correlation between the two occurrences. In Russia, there are reports that earthquakes where felt during the eruption.





Bizarro Earth

Earthquake and Tsunami near Sendai, Japan

Honshu Quake
© Earth Observatory, NASANASA Earth Observatory image created by Robert Simmon and Jesse Allen, using earthquake and plate tectonics data from the USGS Earthquake Hazard Program, land elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) provided by the University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility, and ocean bathymetry data from the British Oceanographic Data Center’s Global Bathmetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO).
On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time (05:46 Universal Time, or UTC), a magnitude 8.9 earthquake struck off the east coast of Japan, at 38.3 degrees North latitude and 142.4 degrees East longitude. The epicenter was 130 kilometers (80 miles) east of Sendai, and 373 kilometers (231 miles) northeast of Tokyo. If initial measurements are confirmed, it will be the world's fifth largest earthquake since 1900 and the worst in Japan's history.

This map shows the location of the March 11 earthquake, as well as the foreshocks (dotted lines) and aftershocks (solid lines). The size of each circle represents the magnitude of the associated quake or shock. The map also includes land elevation data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and ocean bathymetry data from the British Oceanographic Data Center.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the earthquake occurred at a depth of 24.4 kilometers (15.2 miles) beneath the seafloor. The March 11 earthquake was preceded by a series of large foreshocks on March 9, including an M7.2 event. USGS reported that the earthquakes "occurred as a result of thrust faulting on or near the subduction zone interface plate boundary."

Bizarro Earth

Tonga: Earthquake Magnitude 6.1 - 12th March

Tonga Quake_120311
© USGSEarthquake Location
Date-Time:
Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 01:19:07 UTC

Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 02:19:07 PM at epicenter

Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones

Location:
16.727°S, 173.174°W

Depth:
10.9 km (6.8 miles)

Region:
TONGA

Distances:
106 km (65 miles) SE of Hihifo, Tonga

229 km (142 miles) NNE of Neiafu, Tonga

355 km (220 miles) SSW of APIA, Samoa

2528 km (1570 miles) W of Auckland, New Zealand

Ladybug

The End of Honey-Bees?

bee
© n/a
The mysterious collapse of honey-bee colonies is becoming a global phenomenon. Declines in managed bee colonies, seen increasingly in Europe and the US in the past decade, are also now being observed in China and Japan and there are the first signs of African collapses from Egypt, according to the report from the United Nations.

Beekeepers in Western countries have been reporting slow declines of stocks for many years, apparently due to impaired protein production, changes in agricultural practice, or unpredictable weather. In early 2007, abnormally high die-offs (30-70% of hives) of European honey bee colonies occurred in the U.S. and Québec; such a decline seems unprecedented in recent history. This has been dubbed Colony collapse disorder (CCD); it is unclear whether this is simply an accelerated phase of the general decline due to more adverse conditions in 2006, or a novel phenomenon. More than a dozen factors, ranging from declines in flowering plants and the use of memory-damaging insecticides to the world-wide spread of pests and air pollution, may be behind the emerging decline of bee colonies across many parts of the globe.

Blackbox

Japan's quake shifts earth's axis by 25 centimetres

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© Wikipedia
Initial results out of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology show that the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that rattled Japan Friday shifted the earth's rotation axis by about 25 centimetres.

INGV's report, which came hours after the devastating incident, is equivalent to "very, very tiny" changes that won't be seen for centuries, though, Canadian geologists say.

Only after centuries would a second be lost as each day is shortened by a millionth of a second, according to University of Toronto geology professor Andrew Miall.

"Ten inches sounds like quite a lot when you hold a ruler in front of you. But if you think of it in terms of the earth as a whole, it's absolutely tiny; it's minute," he said.

"It's going to make minute changes to the length of a day. It could make very, very tiny changes to the tilt of the earth, which affects the seasons, but these effects are so small, it'd take very precise satellite navigation to pick it up."

Nuke

Japan's Quake Could Have Irradiated the Entire U.S.

Had the massive 8.9 Richter-scale earthquake that has just savaged Japan hit off the California coast, it could have ripped apart at least four coastal reactors and sent a lethal cloud of radiation across the entire United States.



Chernobyl winds, as determined by the French government, but with a map of the United States overlaid on top of it. No sound. There is a slight video glitch at about 0:57

The two huge reactors each at San Onofre and Diablo Canyon are not designed to withstand such powerful shocks. All four are extremely close to major faults.

All four reactors are located relatively low to the coast. They are vulnerable to tsunamis like those now expected to hit as many as fifty countries.

San Onofre sits between San Diego and Los Angeles. A radioactive cloud spewing from one or both reactors there would do incalculable damage to either or both urban areas before carrying over the rest of southern and central California.

Bell

Japan quake causes emergencies at 5 nuke reactors

Japanese nuclear power plant
© Associated Press/Kyodo NewsThis October 2008 photo shows the Fukushima No. 1 power plant of Tokyo Electric Power Co. at Okuma, Fukushima prefecture, northern Japan. Japan's top government spokesman says the country has issued a state of emergency at the nuclear power plant after its cooling system failed.
Japan declared states of emergency for five nuclear reactors at two power plants after the units lost cooling ability in the aftermath of Friday's powerful earthquake. Thousands of residents were evacuated as workers struggled to get the reactors under control to prevent meltdowns.

Operators at the Fukushima Daiichi plant's Unit 1 scrambled ferociously to tamp down heat and pressure inside the reactor after the 8.9 magnitude quake and the tsunami that followed cut off electricity to the site and disabled emergency generators, knocking out the main cooling system.

Some 3,000 people within two miles (three kilometers) of the plant were urged to leave their homes, but the evacuation zone was more than tripled to 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) after authorities detected eight times the normal radiation levels outside the facility and 1,000 times normal inside Unit 1's control room.