The first debris from the March 11 Japanese earthquake/tsunami has reached the shores of the northwest U.S..
The March 11 earthquake off the coast of Japan shifted the seabed as much 165 feet and raised it as much as 33 feet, the largest such change ever recorded.
The meltdown at Fukushima in Japan came within a foot of breaching the reactor.
In other words, the engineering worked.
Japanese engineers have re-adjusted the course of their science probe Akatsuki for a second attempt at orbiting Venus in 2015.
A first glimpse inside the Fukushima nuclear power plant since the March 11 earthquake.
Before and after pictures in Japan, six months after the March 11 tsunami.
An evening pause: The robot obstacle course at the 2006 ROBO-ONE competition in Kawasaki, Japan. Very impressive, for a machine, though this does illustrate how difficult it is to artificially duplicate what life does so naturally.
An evening pause: From a concert performed in Japan on April 10, 2011, only a month after the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Stay for the end, to see the audience’s response.
The engine of Japan’s troubled Venus probe, Akatsuki, has been found too damaged to put the probe into Venus orbit.
JAXA conducted a test ignition of the probe’s main engine on Wednesday to prepare for another attempt to send it into orbit in 2015. But the thrust produced was only one-eighth the amount anticipated, the space agency said. The damage the engine suffered last December when JAXA ignited it in the initial attempt to send the probe into orbit around Venus appears to be more serious than thought, JAXA said.
A private Japanese weather company plans to launch a satellite to track Arctic ice for use by shipping.
The satellite will transmit images and information about sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Weathernews will combine the information with available data on sea currents, weather and wave height to provide consumers with a finished product enabling safe navigation along the northern route.
Though I know most people are skeptical of this idea, I think that all weather information should be gathered and sold by private companies, as Weathernews is doing above. For example, the Weather Channel makes its money providing weather information to the public. If they didn’t get the satellite data free from NOAA weather satellites, they would have every reason to launch their own satellites.
Japan has successfully completed a two second test fire of the engine on its lost Venus probe Akatsuki.
Japan plans to test fire the engine of its failed Venus probe Akatsuki twice this month, in anticipation of another try at Venus orbit in 2015.
Japan has revised its tsunami warning system following the March 11 earthquake/tsunami.
Satellite data has confirmed that the March 11 Japanese tsunami caused icebergs to calf off the Sulzberger Ice Shelf in Antarctica.
The story of Hayabusa, the Japanese space probe that was the first to successfully return material from an asteroid despite serious technical failures, has now inspired three major movies.
The March 11th Japanese tsunami was the highest on record, 132.5 feet high.
The wreckage from the March 11 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, now adrift in the Pacific, is expected to reach the west coast of the United States by 2013.
The Japanese solar sail Ikaros continues to function, more than 100 million miles from Earth.
New satellite data shows that the atmosphere above Japan heated rapidly in the days before the March earthquake.
The [researchers] say that before the M9 earthquake, the total electron content of the ionosphere increased dramatically over the epicentre, reaching a maximum three days before the quake struck. At the same time, satellite observations showed a big increase in infrared emissions from above the epicentre, which peaked in the hours before the quake. In other words, the atmosphere was heating up.
Some amazing before and after pictures of Japan three months after the earthquake and tsunami.
And still no one has died from this particular failure: Japan confirms that all three nuclear reactors melted down after the quake and tsunami.
Cowards: Two New York Metropolitan Opera stars, fearing radiation, have backed out of a Japanese tour in the cities of Tokyo and Nagoya. This, despite the documented lack of radiation:
Tokyo briefly registered nominally higher radiation levels in its air and water, but they have subsided to pre-tsunami levels. There was never any scientific concern of a radiation impact on Nagoya, which is much farther away.
Meanwhile, the efforts to stabilize the reactors in Fukushima are proceeding.
It was revealed today that one of Fukushima’s nuclear reactors did suffer a nuclear meltdown.
As serious as this truly is, please note that the world hasn’t ended. Nor has anyone yet died from this nuclear power plant failure.
The real disaster in Japan: Towns now flood at high tide.
Using lasers instead of spark plugs in your car.
Japan’s tsunami in March produced the largest waves in history.
Some waves grew to more than 100 feet high, breaking historic records, as they squeezed between fingers of land surrounding port towns.
To me, however, this is the biggest takeaway:
Although terrible, the preliminary estimate also finds a better-than 92% survival rate for people living in coastal towns hit by the waves, Bourgeois says. “In that sense, given the magnitude of the unexpectedly large earthquake, things could have been even worse,” she says.
Getting control of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima is going to be a challenging job, no doubt. Nonetheless, it remains a minor and comparatively trivial problem for Japan after the earthquake and tsunami destroyed the country’s northeastern coast, and it saddens me that so much of the American press and public seems unable to absorb this simple fact.
This footage of the tsunami hitting a small coastal town in Japan gives us a clear and unvarnished look of the real disaster there. Near the end you can see people fleeing for their lives, and throughout the video the voices of the watchers can only express horrified gasps at what they are seeing.
The real disaster in Japan continues: Liquefaction.
The real disaster in Japan finally reaches the U.S. and it isn’t radiation: Toyota has announced it will shut its North American plants due to the shortage of parts caused by the earthquake/tsunami.
Another hero: Defiant Japanese boat captain who rode out tsunami.
