Critical New Quake Could Mean Impending Disaster For Japan

5.1 quake 75 miles from Fukushima and 81 miles from Tokyo
That can't be good for the reactors.

earthquake.usgs.gov...

This is my first post, so hi everyone, just like to say I really appreciate the effort you put in to get information out there, so thanks. Thought i would contribute and put some updates on recent earthquake activity around Japan.

5.3 depth of 6 miles - 20:14 - 236 km (146 miles) ENE of Iwaki, Honshu, Japan
5.7 at depth of 14.8 miles - 20:30 - 139 km (86 miles) ESE of TOKYO, Japan
5.1 at depth of 12.6 miles - 21.04 - 48 km (29 miles) ENE of Utsunomiya, Honshu, Japan

source: earthquake.usgs.gov...

Reactor 4 is on fire again !!

CNN just had breaking news...

Reuters reporting it aswell, as is the BBC.
Things seem to be getting worse and worse.



www.reuters.com...

Radiation warning zone expansion...

Warnings to keep out of the rain and use disposable rain coats

More blasts and fire at #4

Water level now low at #5

previous warning zone

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/878b63d2e93e.png[/atsimg]

Updated warning zone

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/b21bfcd8e521.png[/atsimg]

Live now

www.livestation.com...

reply to post by solarsicarian

Hi there, saw your post and noted you haven't got a lot of info yet. Fortunately this weird trace on that seismo was also noted by others over on the Quake Watch 2011 thread. It's a glitch on the N channel on that seismo. Started going bad a few days ago. The Z channel is still okay.

If you go to this post by Puterman he shows the shots from previous days. Anyhow, short answer: sick seismo. Just follow the Z channel on that one and others. (TrueAmerican also says the same thing in his thread on reading GEE: best to just watch the Z channels most of the time.)

Murphy's Law strikes again. Just as I'm posting this, I see that II.ERM's Z channel has also gone very weird. But IU.MAJO is still tracing okay, so it's best to just rely on that one for now for watching any activity on or near Honshu.

Best regards,
Mike

Originally posted by OuttaHere
Just posted this in the wrong thread, re-posting it here:

Isn't the new 6.2 quake Southwest of Tokyo also near the infamous dolphin-slaughter cove in Taiji? Just curious if it's anywhere near there, it looks like it from the maps I'm seeing. If anything "good" can be said to come out of this horrific situation, maybe these current events will put a stop to the monstrous activities going on on that cove. One can only hope.

Of course it will put a stop to these slaughters! Dolphins will now be super-mutant radioactive swimming flesh!

reply to post by JustMike


Cheers!
TrueAmerican suggested I do the same; offending channels have since been removed!!

On another note, would the explosions from the reactor show up in GEE and how would the waveform differ from an earthquake?

Hey TrueAmerican, Just been looking at the earthquake map quakes.globalincidentmap.com... and noticed

Tuesday March 15 2011, 22:16:14 UTC 26 minutes ago Molucca Sea 4.8 depth: 65.9

Is this on the fault line you mention?

reply to post by solarsicarian

Though they seemd quite big, those explosions would probably be too small to show up on either of those seismo stations. But okay, they might. If they did, they'd be quite brief traces and without the classic P and S wave forms of quakes. With quakes, the P wave, being the fastest, arrives first and then the S wave follows after it. (Measuring the time lag between the P and S waves is, in fact, a big part of determining how far away the quake is from the seismo.)

The experts can differentiate explosions from quakes fairly easily. Eeven if there were multiple explosions close together then they'd similarly show up as multiple, short traces, but still without the P and S forms that quakes have.

Powerful explosions (eg in quarrying or mining) can show up on some seismos and places like USGS keep an eye out for these and weed them out so they don't get incorrectly posted as quakes. The auto-plotting equipment might register them as quakes if its parameters are set to simple measure estimated ground acceleration, but the seismologists can review the traces and if there are no P and S wave form signatures then they know they aren't quakes. In that case they delete them from the quake l;ists and move them to the "Mining Blast" or "Other Explosions" lists.

An explosion equivalent to around 1 ton of TNT would register as about a mag 2 quake on seismos that are sensitive enough to pick up smaller quakes. To register a mag 3 would take an explosion of about 30 tons of TNT. A smaller nuclear test normally register somewhere in the mag 4 range.

Bit quakes are incredibly powerful...

*************************************************************

TrueAmerican, you were right, mate. You said there could be trouble with that triple junction and there has been. Now we can only hope that things will settle down but frankly I don't like the look of this. I also was amazed when the JMA official said there was no connection between the megathrust event and the Shizuoka quake. It was the largest quake in that region (of Shizuoka) in some years, but having told us that, he insisted that there's no connection to Friday's quake.

Yeah sure. And I just saw another flock of pigs fly over.

You were right, mate.

Okay after midnight here. I'm outa here. Thanks for your efforts, TA. Sorry to tack this into another post but I'm knackered.

Mike

Anyone monitoring mount Fuji? I realized that the 6.2 was located right underneath it. I heard the last time it erupted was 300 years ago when there was a major magnitude 8.6 at sea.

reply to post by shikori


There is a thread about it (at least one that I know of)

Link to thread

reply to post by shikori


There was a 4.7 there today. Zorgon linked it over on the 8.9 Quake thread.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

If Fuji went, it would be an unimaginable nightmare, one shudders to even think on it.

reply to post by solarsicarian


Where on the thread did he link? There are over 250 pages you know

It's been too quiet over there the past hour or two.

Better things don't get a chance to build up.

reply to post by shikori


Click on the link in my post, it's on that page!
I hope!!

Interesting read here

emsnews.wordpress.com...

reply to post by solarsicarian

www.iris.edu...
Its oK I found it.

reply to post by ljonesyuk


Interesting indeed.

It seems that the eruption in 1707 was a ‘Plinian’ event. This refers to Mt. Vesuvius when a column of eruptive materials went all the way to the stratosphere and then spread out like a pine tree and then it suddenly collapsed downwards and roared across several Roman cities, killing everyone and covering the entire place in volcanic debris taller than the tallest houses.



This cut away diagram shows us something nasty: the top of ‘Old Fuji’ blew off exactly like Mt. Vesuvius. An even older volcano, Konitake, is displaced to the north. This means the hot spot where these volcanoes connect to the hot lava below has been steady while Japan has shifted position. With this latest shift, expect the volcano to be active again. It has been over 300 years, after all.

japan_trenchs.jpg 345×271 pixels

Two subduction troughs intersect right under Mt. Fuji. It is totally logical for these to now have increased stress on themselves, with the Sagami trough pivoting on the end of the Suruga/Nankai trough.



Mt. Fuji is Japan’s tallest mountain which is another indication it may have a ‘leveling’ even where the mountain is made smaller by blowing the top literally off…again.

reply to post by JustMike



Lets hope we don't ever see those kind of waveforms.
Cheers for info