March 1, 2007, March 14, 2011, February 28, 2021
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake jolted the seafloor about 70 kilometers (45 miles) offshore of Japan’s Tohoku area. It was the biggest quake tape-recorded in Japan and the 4th biggest worldwide because seismic recording started around 1900.
Within an hour, incredible tsunami waves swamped much of the eastern Japanese coast, sending out 5- to 10-meter walls of water into seaside towns and cities. In Miyako, Iwate Prefecture, the runup height from the tsunami—the optimum elevation that water moved upland from the coast—reached 40.5 meters (133 feet) above water level. Near Sendai, flood waters permeated 10 kilometers (6 miles) inland.
March 1, 2007
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the earthquake moved Japan’s primary island of Honshu eastward by 2.4 meters (8 feet) and dropped about 400 kilometers (250 miles) of shoreline by 0.6 meters (2 feet). The tsunami impacted a 2000-kilometer stretch of coast and swamped more than 400 square kilometers of land in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures.
Some of the worst destruction was observed at Rikuzentakata (Iwate). The images above were gotten in 2007, 2011, and 2021 by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER), a joint Japanese and U.S. instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite. The images integrate infrared, red, and green wavelengths of light to make false-color images that compare water, greenery, and metropolitan facilities. In the 2011 image, the majority of the locations in purple-blue were flooded or denuded.
March 14, 2011
The March 2011 tsunami eliminated more than 1,700 citizens (about 8 percent of the population) of Rikuzentakata and ruined 80 percent of its houses. More than 70,000 trees in the Takatamatsubara pine forest on the waterside—planted in the 17th century as a tidewater control—were gotten rid of. Flood waters sat for weeks on rice paddies and other farming land. Satellites caught scenes of the destruction simply one day and 3 days after the occasion. On March 14, 2011, The Mainichi Daily News stated: “Rikuzentakata has been erased.”
A years later on, the location is still restoring. A 12.5-meter (41-foot) high concrete seawall now stands along 2 kilometers of the waterside in Rikuzentakata. (More than 430 kilometers/265 miles of seawalls have actually been developed and down the Tohoku coast.) Engineers and building and construction teams likewise brought in enormous quantities of soil and rock to raise the level of the land by 10 meters prior to brand-new structures were built. And regional authorities released a job in 2017 to plant 40,000 tree seedlings along the town’s shoreline.
February 28, 2021
According to the Japan Reconstruction Agency, almost 400,000 structures were ruined or irreparably harmed and another 750,000 were partly ruined throughout the nation in March 2011. Nearly 16,000 individuals were eliminated and 2,500 are still noted as missing out on. The crisis and surges at the neighboring Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant in between March 12-15, 2011, contributed to the anguish and displacement of Japanese residents. More than 21,000 hectares of farmland were ruined by flooding and by seawater; some has actually been recovered and some has actually gone back to wildland. The World Bank approximated it to be the costliest natural catastrophe in world history. According to some price quotes, Japan has actually invested almost $300 billion (U.S) on restoring the area to date.
Visit NASA Earth Observatory’s Tohoku/Sendai gallery to see twenty other images and stories from the days and months after the earthquake and tsunami.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, utilizing information from NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.
