JMA confirms over 6,500 quakes struck Japan this year, three times more than in 2015
, the Japan Meteorological Agency said Friday.
As of 7 p.m. on Thursday, a total of 6,566 quakes with an intensity measured on the Japanese seismic scale hit the archipelago, up from 1,842 in 2015, according to the figures revealed on Friday.
The JMA scale used to measure the intensity of earthquakes runs from zero to seven, with zero being the weakest, and focuses more on the affected areas than on the intensity of the tremors as is the case with the Richter scale, Efe news reported.
More than 10,000 earthquakes struck the country in 2011, most of them aftershocks from the devastating earthquake that triggered the tsunami which led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the worst since Chernobyl.
Although the number of quakes has decreased considerably since then, the Japanese agency said the increase this year could be attributed to the powerful earthquakes that struck the Kumamoto prefecture in the southern island of Kyushu in April.
Comment: Lately, there's been some unusually thick and persistent fog in a number of places, not least northern US, northern China, and northern India.