Natural Disaster Thread

[HHTel]

NHK have just released a 50 minute video of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan March 2011. It was also responsible for the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
A shocking record of the event which apparently was the worst on record with the tsunami reaching heights of 15 meters. It must have been absolute hell living through that.
I know we've had a terrible tsunami experience. Ours came without warning. At least Japan did issue imminent warnings which must have saved countless lives. The video is available until the end of the year.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/onde ... gmtY9MQbaY

[pharvey]

This could be a bad one.....

Haiti struck by 7.2-magnitude earthquake - It was estimated that a similar sized quake in 2010 killed some 200,000.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... earthquake

[PeteC]

If this volcano had been on land and elevated, it could have been a global disaster in terms of ash cover and sun blockage. There is so much video, charts and photos at the below links it's best to read it all there.

Tsunami threat over after huge Pacific volcano eruption - monitor

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60012337

Tsunami advisory in effect for California as waves hit Tonga following volcanic eruption

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/15/asia ... index.html

Tsunami hits Tonga after volcanic explosion; advisories issued for U.S., Canada

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News ... 642252138/

Tsunami threat recedes from huge Pacific volcanic eruption

https://apnews.com/article/media-enviro ... 780976def8

Huge Tonga volcanic eruption caused 'signifcant damage

https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/22482 ... ant-damage

Mud, vegetation on new Pacific island baffle scientists (From 3 years ago)

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/05/aust ... index.html

More is being added. See the latest WIKI link below for the information:

...."Preliminary observations showed that the eruption column ejected a large amount of volcanic material into the stratosphere. The eruption has potential to cause a temporary cooling climate effect.[26] A scientist from the University of Auckland described it as a one-in-1000-year event.[27][28]".....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hung ... nd_tsunami

[KhunLA]

This could be a bad one.....

Haiti struck by 7.2-magnitude earthquake - It was estimated that a similar sized quake in 2010 killed some 200,000.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... earthquake

Duration of the quake in 2010 was the difference. A once in a century happening.

Not to be repeated anytime soon .... hopefully, or at least, not affecting populated areas.

[PeteC]

More data and new link added to the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano eruption - Tonga post above. ^^

[KhunLA]

A few short vids of wave arriving at USA, nothing exciting, but amazing that it's even noticeable from that far away.
Bottom 2, only ones of slight interest.
https://www.rt.com/news/546171-californ ... ing-tonga/

[migrant]

A few short vids of wave arriving at USA, nothing exciting, but amazing that it's even noticeable from that far away.
Bottom 2, only ones of slight interest.
https://www.rt.com/news/546171-californ ... ing-tonga/

A friend in San Diego said tsunami warnings were posted at the beaches.

[PeteC]

Pacific volcano: Ash-covered Tonga is like a moonscape say residents

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60009944

A massive volcanic eruption in Tonga that triggered tsunami waves has smothered the Pacific islands in ash, cut power and severed communications.

Up to 80,000 people there could be affected, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) told the BBC.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the tsunami had wreaked "significant damage", washing boats ashore and battering beachside shops.

No deaths have been reported so far.

Information remains scarce, however, and New Zealand and Australia are sending surveillance flights to assess the extent of the damage.

Katie Greenwood of the IFRC in Fiji said that help was urgently needed.

"We suspect there could be up to 80,000 people throughout Tonga affected by either the eruption itself or from the tsunami wave and inundation as a result of the eruption," she said.

"That was a shock to people, so we do hold some concern for those outer islands and we're very keen to hear from people."

The underwater volcano erupted on Saturday, sending a plume of ash into the sky and triggering warnings of 1.2m (4ft) waves reaching Tonga. The eruption was so loud it could be heard in New Zealand, some 2,383km (1,481 miles) from Tonga.

Locals say Tonga looks "like a moonscape" after being coated in a layer of volcanic ash.

The dust was reportedly contaminating water supplies and making fresh water a vital need, Ms Ardern said on Sunday.

Aid charities said the ash had prompted authorities to tell people to drink bottled water and wear face masks to protect their lungs.

As the sky darkened with ash, videos showed traffic jams as people fled low-lying areas by car. Hours later, Tonga's internet and phone lines went down, making the island's 105,000 residents almost entirely unreachable.

Prior to the largest eruption, the volcano had been erupting for several days. The Tonga Meteorological Agency had warned that the smell of sulphur and ammonia was being reported in some areas.

Ms Ardern said power was being restored to some parts of the island and mobile phones were slowly starting to work again. But the situation in some coastal areas remained unknown.

Unable to speak to their friends and family, many Tongans in Australia and New Zealand have grown concerned for their safety.

Fatima said she had not heard anything from her colleague who runs a seafront restaurant in Tonga's capital Nuku'alofa.

"It's all very sad, we are hoping for the best," she told the BBC. "This will hit them so hard as they have been in lockdown a long time with no tourists visiting and now this."

Satellite images suggest some outlying islands have been completely submerged by seawater.

Experts say the eruption of the Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha'apai volcano is one of the most violent in the region in decades.

It triggered tsunami warnings in several countries, including Japan and the US, where flooding hit some coastal parts of California and Alaska.

UK Foreign Office minister Zac Goldsmith called the situation in Tonga "shocking" and said Britain stood "ready to help and support our Commonwealth friend and partner in any way we can".

[PeteC]

Analyzing the data. Best read at link due to photos/charts.

Why satellites are key to understanding Pacific volcano

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60019423

[Nereus]

More indepth info about this volcano:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-22/ ... /100773458

How a Tongan volcano shocked the world

This story features imagery from the Himawari-8 satellite courtesy of the Japan Meteorological Agency, Sentinel 2 courtesy of the European Union as well as commercial satellite operators Planet Labs PBC and Maxar Technologies.

Sea floor bathymetry was sourced from the US-based National Centers for Environmental Information. The sea floor 3D model was inspired by Frédérik Ruys.

Volcano data was sourced from the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program.

[PeteC]

Earthquake: Japan hit by tremor prompting tsunami alert

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60770100

A powerful earthquake hit north-east Japan on Wednesday night, temporarily cutting power to two million homes and prompting a tsunami advisory.

The magnitude 7.3 tremor struck the same region where a major quake triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster, 11 years ago.

In some areas it was too forceful for people to stand, and buildings rattled in the capital Tokyo, AFP reports.

The quake took place at 23:36 (14:36 GMT), Japanese authorities said.

Aftershocks were said to be possible in Fukushima, Miyagi and Yamagata prefectures.

Japan's meteorological agency issued an advisory for tsunami waves of one metre (3.3ft) for parts of the north-east coast, with local media reporting waves of 20cm (0.7ft) in some areas.

Local electricity providers said about 700,000 homes in Tokyo and 156,000 in Japan's north-east had been left without power immediately after the shock, but supplies have since been restored to many households.

A number of people across north-eastern Japan were hurt by falling objects or in falls, and in the city of Soma local media reported that one man in his sixties had died.

A bullet train north of Fukushima city was also derailed by the quake, according to its operator. There were no immediate reports of injuries from that incident.

Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told reporters the government was still trying to assess the extent of any damage, and authorities said emergency services had been inundated with calls.

In Ishinomaki, a city official told AFP news agency he had been woken up by "extremely violent shaking".

"I heard the ground rumpling. Rather than feeling scared, I immediately remembered the Great East Japan earthquake," he said referring to the 2011 disaster.

Thursday's earthquake was recorded 57km (35 miles) off the coast of Fukushima, not far from the epicentre of the most powerful earthquake in Japan's history, which killed 18,000 people when it struck eleven years ago.

The 2011 earthquake triggered a tsunami and destroyed the Fukushima nuclear plant, sparking a major disaster after radiation leaked from the plant.

Nuclear authorities said that no abnormalities have been detected after Wednesday night's earthquake at the damaged Fukushima site.

[PeteC]

Scientists find evidence of largest earthquake in human history 3,800 years ago

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2022/0 ... 650394177/

April 19 (UPI) -- Scientists have found evidence that an earthquake 3,800 years ago in Northern Chile is the largest in human history, according to a new study.

The quake had a magnitude of around 9.5, prompting tsunamis that struck countries as far away as New Zealand and boulders the size of cars to be carried inland by the waves, according to researchers at the University of Southampton.

Since earthquakes occur when two tectonic plates rub together and rupture, a longer rupture indicates a bigger earthquake, they said.

"It had been thought there could not be an event of that size in the north of the country because you could not get a long enough rupture," study co-author James Goff said in a press release.

The largest known earthquake before the new study was the 9.5 magnitude Valdivia earthquake, which struck Southern Chile in May 1960, with a rupture zone that stretched up to about 621 miles along the country's coast, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Estimates of the death toll from the quake range from 1,655 to 5,700, along with leaving 3,000 injured, 2 million homeless and causing $550 million in economic damage in Southern Chile.

"But we have now found evidence of a rupture that's about 1,000 kilometers long just off the Atacama Desert coast and that is massive," said Goff, a visiting professor at the University of Southampton in Britain.

The new study was published this month in the journal Science Advances.

Researchers reported that that the rupture caused the coastline of northern Chile, which was home to pre-historic hunter-gatherer communities 3,800 years ago, to lift up -- in addition to generating a massive tsunami.

"The Atacama Desert is one of the driest, most hostile environments in the world and finding tsunamis there has always been difficult," Goff said.

"However, we found evidence of marine sediments and a lot of beasties that would have been living quietly in the sea before being thrown inland. And we found all these very high up and a long way inland so it could not have been a storm that put them there."

"The local population there were left with nothing," Goff said.

Goff was asked to join the study about a week after after he had been investigating a site in New Zealand on Chatham Island that included boulders, some the size of cars, that had been carried inland by waves around the same time of the earthquake in Northern Chile.

"In New Zealand, we said that those boulders could only have been moved by a tsunami from northern Chile, and it would need to be something like a 9.5 magnitude earthquake to generate it. And now we have found it," Goff said.

[PeteC]

Tonga eruption was 'record atmospheric explosion'

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61452860

The eruption of the Tonga volcano in January has been confirmed as the biggest explosion ever recorded in the atmosphere by modern instrumentation.

It was far bigger than any 20th Century volcanic event, or indeed any atom bomb test conducted after WWII.

The assessment comes in a pair of scholarly papers in the journal Science that have reviewed all the data.

Of recent history, it's likely only the Krakatoa eruption of 1883 rivalled the atmospheric disturbance produced.

That catastrophic event in Indonesia is thought to have claimed more than 30,000 lives. Fortunately, the 15 January climactic eruption of the underwater volcano at Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai (HTHH) in the south Pacific resulted in very few deaths, even though it too produced large tsunamis.

"Tonga was a truly global event, just as Krakatau was, but we've now got all these geophysical observation systems and they recorded something that was really unprecedented in the modern data," Dr Robin Matoza, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, told BBC News. He is the lead author on one of the papers.

Scientists now have access to an extraordinary array of ground-based and spaceborne instruments, including atmospheric pressure sensors, seismometers, hydro-phones, and a fleet of satellites that monitor the Earth across the entire light spectrum.

The colossal Tonga explosion, which came at the end of of several weeks of activity at the seamount, produced several types of atmospheric pressure waves that propagated vast distances.

In the audible range of frequencies, people 10,000km away in Alaska reported hearing repeated booms.

The global network of detectors set up to monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty picked up the infrasound signal. Infrasound has frequencies that are just below what humans are capable of hearing.

The network's data indicated the Tonga volcano blast produced an atmospheric pressure wave comparable with that from the biggest ever nuclear explosion - the Tsar bomb detonated by the Soviets in 1961 - but lasted four times longer.

The papers discuss at length the perturbations driven by so called Lamb waves, named after the early 20th Century mathematician Horace Lamb.

These are energetic waves in the air that propagate at the speed of sound, along a path guided by the surface of the planet. They are also non-dispersive, in other words they maintain their shape as they move and so are conspicuous over a long time.

The Lamb wave pulses produced by the Tonga eruption were seen to circle the Earth at least four times.

In the UK, which is some 16,5000km from Tonga, these pulses began arriving on the evening of the 15th, about 14 hours after the climactic eruption on the other side of the planet.

They lifted the clouds over the UK.

"At the time, we had a laser cloud-base recorder looking at the cloud base and as the wave went through the cloud was perturbed," recalls Prof Giles Harrison, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Reading and co-author on one of the papers.

"If ever you wanted evidence that the atmosphere is a remarkably interconnected thing, this was it. And what happens on one side of the planet can propagate around to the other side at the speed of sound."

Where the Lamb waves coupled with ocean waves, they were able to generate tsunami - not just in the Pacific Ocean, but in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea as well.

Scientists are still investigating the generation of near-field tsunamis that ran up coastlines in the Tongan archipelago. Some were undoubtedly crafted by pressure waves from the volcano pushing down on the water surface, but investigations are on-going to determine whether collapse of part of the volcano also made a significant contribution.

This will be evident from the seafloor mapping projects that are due to report their results in the coming weeks.

[PeteC]

Thousands evacuate from 'dangerous' Sydney floods

https://www.bangkokpost.com/world/23394 ... ney-floods

SYDNEY: Rapidly rising rivers swamped swathes of rain-lashed Sydney on Monday, forcing thousands to flee "dangerous" floods as the city's largest dam spilled torrents of water.

On the third day of torrential east coast rains, emergency workers said they had rescued more than 80 people since the previous evening.

Many people had been trapped in their cars trying to cross flood-swept roads or were unable to leave homes surrounded by rising waters.

Australia has been at the sharp end of climate change, with droughts, deadly bushfires, bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef and floods becoming more common and intense as global weather patterns change.

Higher temperatures mean the atmosphere holds more moisture, unleashing more rain.

About 32,000 people were ordered to evacuate or be ready to flee across New South Wales, the emergency services department said, with the army sending 100 troops to help operations in the storm-battered state.

"The ground is saturated, the rivers are fast flowing, the dams are overflowing," said State Emergency Services commissioner Carlene York.

"It is particularly dangerous out there," she said at a news conference.

Mud-brown river waters transformed a large stretch of land into a lake in the southwestern Sydney suburb of Camden.

Roads disappeared into the waters and mobile homes stood in knee-high water, at least one toppled on its side, television images showed.

Large volumes of water gushed from the Warragamba Dam, which has been spilling excess water since Sunday.

The huge concrete dam lies on the western outskirts of Sydney and provides most of the city's drinking water.

Heavy rains in New South Wales may persist for at least another 24 hours, forecasters said.

- 'Becoming more common' -

The wild weather whipped up drama off the Sydney coast, as rescuers battled to help the 150-metre Portland Bay cargo ship with 21 crew which lost power in heavy seas.

The Hong Kong-registered bulk carrier is double-anchored, a police spokesman said.

A plan to airlift crew members off the boat with two helicopters had been delayed because of safety concerns, he said.

Two tugboats were headed to the ship to take it further offshore.

Australia's east coast has suffered repeated flooding in the past 18 months.

More than 20 people died only in March this year as floodwaters lapped at rooftops and torrents swept cars off roads.

The current weather system over Sydney is being fed by warm, wet air from near the equator, said Kimberley Reid, an atmospheric scientist at Monash University.

Rainfall in eastern Australia is highly variable, making it hard to pin this event to climate change, she said.

"However, our research of the March 2021 Sydney floods found that similar events over Sydney were likely to occur 80 percent more often by the end of the 21st century."

Australia must prepare for more regular flooding events, New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet told a news conference.

"There is no doubt these events are becoming more common," he said.

"Governments need to adjust and make sure that we respond to the changing environment we find ourselves in."

[pharvey]

Sadly, I feel the death toll is going to increase.

Full Atricle @ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... nesia-java

Earthquake on Indonesia’s Main island of Java Kills at Least 162 People

"At least 162 people have been killed after a magnitude-5.6 earthquake struck Indonesia’s main island of Java, triggering landslides and causing buildings to collapse.

The US Geological Survey said the quake, which struck late in the afternoon, was centred in the Cianjur region of West Java province at a depth of 6.2 miles (10km).

Ridwan Kamil, the governor of West Java, said 162 people had been killed.

“The majority of those who died were children,” he said, adding that many were students who were taking extra lessons. “So many incidents occurred at several Islamic schools.”

Footage from Cianjur showed a school building with a collapsed roof, as well as badly damaged homes where brick walls had been torn down. At a local hospital, overwhelmed by the number of victims, the injured were treated outside, some lying on mattresses or blankets on the ground as they were given oxygen masks and IV drips."