5 ms·

Japan's earthquake alters coastline, extends it by two football fields

61 points by clwg 3y ago

teruakohatu 3y ago
There was also significant uplight from the 2016 Kaikōura earthquakes in New Zealand. It was quite amazing to see. It lead to massive death of marine organisms that were underwater and then suddenly were not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kaik%C5%8Dura_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kaik%C5%8Dura_earthquake
rad_gruchalski 3y ago
American football fields, or "soccer" fields? Surprisingly, the answer is in the article: > In some places, the earthquake extended the coastline by as much as 250 meters, or about 820 feet, according to a statement from the University of Tokyo. That's about the length of 2.2 American football fields.
- sdflhasjd 3y ago
  ... where it's being used as a measure of length and not area. How many is that in human hair widths?
  - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
    Let’s not forget, the article doesn’t say if it’s a length of 2.2 American football fields lengths or widths. But we can deduce that.
- FartyMcFarter 3y ago
  In case anyone else was curious: The American football fields are 109.8 meters long, while football/soccer fields are 90 to 120 meters long (but most commonly 105 meters long for professional stadium fields).
  - Kon-Peki 3y ago
    Hold on there! Are talking about American American football fields, or Canadian American football fields? Or American arena football fields?
- belter 3y ago
  Are we back at this? I assumed the agreed SI Unit at HN was either 'number of code lines' or 'server racks'...
- NooneAtAll3 3y ago
  normal football fields or "handegg" fields*
  - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
    About that, yeah… > Linguistically creative students at the University of Oxford in the 1880s distinguished between the sports of “rugger” (rugby football) and “assoccer” (association football). The latter term was further shortened to “soccer” (sometimes spelled “socker”), and the name quickly spread beyond the campus. However, “soccer” never became much more than a nickname in Great Britain. By the 20th century, rugby football was more commonly called rugby, while association football had earned the right to be known as just plain football. > Meanwhile, in the United States, a sport emerged in the late 19th century that borrowed elements of both rugby and association football. Before long, it had proved more popular than either of them. In full, it was known as gridiron football, but most people never bothered with the first word. As a result, American association-football players increasingly adopted soccer to refer to their sport. https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-some-people-call-football-soccer https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-some-people-call-foo...
    - NooneAtAll3 3y ago
      doesn't change that it's not a ball and almost nobody hits with a foot unlike hands and eggs
- lsb 3y ago
  That's not _nearly_ the most unusual unit of measurement one could find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu...
- louthy 3y ago
  To avoid any confusion, it’s 138 bald eagles
  - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
    Note to German readers: not Igels as your German NFL rtl nitro staff calls them.
  - inkyoto 3y ago
    Did you use the American bald eagle wingspan (latitudinal) length or the length (longitudinal) of the said bald eagle from the tip of the beak to the end of the tail in your calculations? Considering the length of an American football field to be 109.73 metres (120 yards), and an average wingspan for the bald eagle to be 2 metres (approximately 6.7 feet), only 107 bald eagles would equate to the length of a single football field. However, if you used an average longitudinal length of 86.5 cm for the American bald eagle, one football field would equate to approximately 127 bald eagles in length, and then you have a rounding error that has crept into your calculations.
    - louthy 3y ago
      > the earthquake extended the coastline by as much as 250 meters, I took the 250 metres (I know, I know ... a 'metre' is approximately 0.2 Ford Mustangs), and the wingspan of a bald eagle of 1.8 metres (1 Steven Spielberg). Divide the two numbers and you get 138 bald eagles. Rounding errors in unit translation may have occurred.
      - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
        > and the wingspan of a bald eagle of 1.8 metres (1 Steven Spielberg) But Spielberg’s height is 1.72m. Did you mean Taylor Swift, Brad Pitt, or Leonardo DiCaprio?
        louthy 3y ago
        “Rounding errors in unit translation may have occurred.”
- johnwalkr 3y ago
  I was ready to defend it this time, because for area, it isn't intuitive to grasp square metres or kilometres for irregular shapes. But in fact they are using it for length here. Maybe I still want to defend it as it does give me a mental visual image and practically everyone has the experience of watching a variety of football and/or playing a variety of football.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I think it works here because it gives a sense like "imagine two new football fields showed up on your local coastline". But then maybe that's not the right sense. It could be true for miles of coastline. Regardless it is a significant change.
  - CosmicShadow 3y ago
    Maybe practically everyone "in America"
    - johnwalkr 3y ago
      By "variety of football" I meant American football and football/soccer. The lengths of both fields is about the same.
      - averageRoyalty 3y ago
        You say that, but I have no idea how long those. If we played soccer, we'd play it at the local footy oval[0]. I don't know anyone who plays gridiron ("American Football"), but I assume they'd play that there too. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football_playing_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football_play...
      - Grimpen 3y ago
        I did a "Sportsball Fields" conversion tool for calculator. Only thing is it assumes area, not length. It lets me convert between regulation fields for National Football League, International Football Association Board, Canadian Football League, Rugby Union (max and min permissible), Rugby League (max & min) plus curling, and ice hockey (NFL and IIHF). Just need to figure out Australian Rules Football. And then sorry do it all over for length. Anything but metric.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  I mean, the fact that they even had to use "football" fields as a measure of size was obviously an American thing! It's common to hear that on the news here. The other day there was news about a hole the size of a "fridge" on a street... The lengths Americans go to avoid the metric system :)
  - rootusrootus 3y ago
    You know why Americans call soccer soccer? Because Britain. Pick a name and stick with it, dammit.
- mulmen 3y ago
  250 meters is 273 yards. An American football field is generally understood to be 100 yards in this context but the article claims a distance of 2.2 football fields. 273/100 is 2.7 fields. 273/2.2 is 124 yards per field. Are they using the total length with endzones? That's a confusing definition. They could have just said "roughly two football fields" and been fine. But then they did the math and made it more confusing.
_n_b_ 3y ago
But... the length of a coastline is famously not definitively measurable. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox)
- tavavex 3y ago
  I think this article refers to some areas rising enough to have the coast move back by about 250m, not to an increase in length of the entire Japanese coastline.
- vidarh 3y ago
  It does not have a well defined length in itself, but as soon as you define a method of measurement that problem goes away, so assuming the same method has been used for the old and new number there is no problem.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- philipov 3y ago
  You can still say that the perimeter definitively got longer. Just add a parameter epsilon greater than zero for each possible way of measuring it, so that all of them are longer by some indefinite amount.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  It’s lower boundable though
anothernerd 3y ago
Sometimes, american measuring systems make me want to slap myself
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  I bought a new tape measure for DIY, it still has millimetres as a measurement. Sure. I am totally going to measure my new bookshelf in mm.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    Aren't the marked in between the centimetres? And aren't they useful if you're working with something that was originally measured in inches and you're doing a lot of cuts of 2.54cm etc.?
  - askvictor 3y ago
    If you're going to pick one unit for unambiguous measurements for most day-to-day use, you could do a lot worse than mm.
  - mulmen 3y ago
    I have never seen a tape measure in the US without both scales.
  - freetime2 3y ago
    I have a tape measure in mm and have absolutely no issue using it to measure things up to 5m in length. It’s trivial to convert in your head between mm, cm, and meters and record whatever unit makes the most sense. Or it’s also fine to just work in mm for largish objects - anyone with any experience with metric units should have no trouble visualizing a car, for example, that is 4,555 mm long. And car dimensions are routinely given in mm by manufacturers on websites, pamphlets, etc for use by the general public. So I think mm should be just fine for a bookshelf, unless it’s 10+ meters long. BTW I am an American who grew up using feet/inches, and am now a total metric system convert. I too grow tired of the endless snarky remarks every time someone uses a non-SI unit on the internet, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the US way (and other countries who still use non-SI units for certain applications, the US isn’t the only one although it is perhaps the worst offender) of doing things is somehow better. It’s just the convention that people are familiar with in the US.
karlzt 3y ago
Japan needs more territory so the earth is giving them more.
- eggy 3y ago
  They don't because the birth rate tanked, and besides China is going to claim the new land as originally part of the Seventh Kingdom and invade it after Taiwan.
tavavex 3y ago
It's really strange how "football fields" or "Olympic swimming pools" etc became such common comparison points for news headlines. Isn't the universality kind of the appeal of having units of measurement? I'd argue most people see things that are a meter long a lot more often than football fields.
- mlacks 3y ago
  For me, a few hundred meters is difficult to comceptualize. I can search a football arena and notice the people around/inside it and get a better feel for the story than if just presented in meters
- grrowl 3y ago
  Pumping up the grandiose factor; a meter is tangible and can be imagined 100x, but football fields are really big!
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  To me the point of these is not to explain size but more to address the feeling of "it's bigger than the biggest thing you might have experienced" An other common reference in Japan is the Tokyo Dome baseball stadium also used for live performances, and it feels exactly the same as telling someone you store 5 Library of Congress worth of data in your NAS.
- johnwalkr 3y ago
  I propose using multiples of 1% of the length of the 100m dash. Maybe we can find a shorthand way to write it.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  It's also weird to use a football field as a unit of length not area.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Not really, as in American football, the goal is to traverse some specific length, so no one really thinks about the area in much detail. For example, I could tell you that a football field is 120 yards in length (100 yards for the actual play area and 10 yards on each side for the endzone) but I could not tell you the width off the top of my head.
rkagerer 3y ago
Has the opposite ever occurred, causing someone's entire house & property to become permenantly submerged underwater? Are there any insurance riders that'd cover such an event, or would affected individuals be entirely at the mercy of gov't disaster relief contingencies / personal savings?
- throwup238 3y ago
  The only thing I can think of is Hawaii’s lava flows, which can essentially “pave over” plots of land or even entire neighborhoods. To my knowledge no one will insure that kind of damage, just general insurance for any buildings on the property.
- philipwhiuk 3y ago
  Coastal erosion happens all the time. And yes, it's either covered under property insurance or your house is uninsurable, depending on the known risk when you buy/renew the insurance.
- darkhorn 3y ago
  Yes, 1999 Turkey eartquake. And 2023 Turkey eartquake.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Not an entirely permanent case, but I remember seeing a documentary about people living on shifting river deltas in Bangladesh, where the land they 'own' can get submerged for some years, forcing them to make a temporary house elsewhere, but able to go back and rebuild when/if the land re-emerges. But insurance is of course not really involved because the people living in these circumstances are typically not so well off. IIRC government relief is also not really much of a thing for those communities. They just rely on each other, knowing that by helping others in the community, they'll get help in return when they need it.
numpad0 3y ago
There is at least one fishery port that had just become a breakwater built on land. Insane. 1: https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/fdc126664613350e8448eed52c5700c51dc42b36/images/000 https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/fdc126664613350e8448eed52c...
freetime2 3y ago
This earthquake has been really devastating for the Noto peninsula. 128 confirmed deaths so far, with 195 people still reported as missing/unconfirmed. 28,000 people have evacuated to shelters, and many more are without power and water in their homes. And right now it is snowing, compounding the suffering for people without power, and complicating cleanup efforts. [1] A lot of the infrastucture has been destroyed in the area, and 2,000 people are isolated due to roads being impassable. Fishing is one of the primary industries in the area, and many boats and coastal buildings were lost/damaged in the resulting tsunami. And with the coast having risen by up to 4m in some areas, there are ports which are no longer even accessible by boat. Most of the people worst affected have been the elderly. More than 50% of the population in the area is over the age of 65. And older people are more likely to live in older homes that are more susceptible to damage in an earthquake. And there are reports of covid and the flu spreading at evacuation centers. Over the past several years there has been an "earthquake swarm" in the area. Experts have speculated that it is due to water seeping into the earth's crust along with a subducting oceanic plate, causing swelling, weakening bedrock, and making faults more "slippery". [2] The Jan 1 earthquake occurred over a far wider area than previous quakes in the region, starting in the Suzu area and spreading to other active faults in the area. [3] Experts are advising that, while considerable stress has been released from this event, people should be on alert for more quakes in the future including the possibility of another magnitude 7+ quake. [1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240108_02/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240108_02/ [2] https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14515789 https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14515789 [3] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2944/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2944/
- SenHeng 3y ago
  Noto has been the main new piece for good reasons, but other areas are suffering too. Niigata has undergone severe liquification. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240102_27/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240102_27/
GuB-42 3y ago
> Japan's earthquake alters coastline, extends it by two football fields. Extending the coastline by 250m is one thing, but having football fields appear just like that really is something. I hope the energy released by the earthquake didn't result in the appearance of a bunch of Hiroshima bombs.
undefeated 3y ago
Anything but the metric system

61 points by clwg 3y ago

There was also significant uplight from the 2016 Kaikōura earthquakes in New Zealand. It was quite amazing to see. It lead to massive death of marine organisms that were underwater and then suddenly were not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kaik%C5%8Dura_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kaik%C5%8Dura_earthquake

rad_gruchalski 3y ago

American football fields, or "soccer" fields? Surprisingly, the answer is in the article: > In some places, the earthquake extended the coastline by as much as 250 meters, or about 820 feet, according to a statement from the University of Tokyo. That's about the length of 2.2 American football fields.

sdflhasjd 3y ago
... where it's being used as a measure of length and not area. How many is that in human hair widths?
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  Let’s not forget, the article doesn’t say if it’s a length of 2.2 American football fields lengths or widths. But we can deduce that.
FartyMcFarter 3y ago
In case anyone else was curious: The American football fields are 109.8 meters long, while football/soccer fields are 90 to 120 meters long (but most commonly 105 meters long for professional stadium fields).
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  Hold on there! Are talking about American American football fields, or Canadian American football fields? Or American arena football fields?
belter 3y ago
Are we back at this? I assumed the agreed SI Unit at HN was either 'number of code lines' or 'server racks'...
NooneAtAll3 3y ago
normal football fields or "handegg" fields*
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  About that, yeah… > Linguistically creative students at the University of Oxford in the 1880s distinguished between the sports of “rugger” (rugby football) and “assoccer” (association football). The latter term was further shortened to “soccer” (sometimes spelled “socker”), and the name quickly spread beyond the campus. However, “soccer” never became much more than a nickname in Great Britain. By the 20th century, rugby football was more commonly called rugby, while association football had earned the right to be known as just plain football. > Meanwhile, in the United States, a sport emerged in the late 19th century that borrowed elements of both rugby and association football. Before long, it had proved more popular than either of them. In full, it was known as gridiron football, but most people never bothered with the first word. As a result, American association-football players increasingly adopted soccer to refer to their sport. https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-some-people-call-football-soccer https://www.britannica.com/story/why-do-some-people-call-foo...
  - NooneAtAll3 3y ago
    doesn't change that it's not a ball and almost nobody hits with a foot unlike hands and eggs
lsb 3y ago
That's not _nearly_ the most unusual unit of measurement one could find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measu...
louthy 3y ago
To avoid any confusion, it’s 138 bald eagles
- rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  Note to German readers: not Igels as your German NFL rtl nitro staff calls them.
- inkyoto 3y ago
  Did you use the American bald eagle wingspan (latitudinal) length or the length (longitudinal) of the said bald eagle from the tip of the beak to the end of the tail in your calculations? Considering the length of an American football field to be 109.73 metres (120 yards), and an average wingspan for the bald eagle to be 2 metres (approximately 6.7 feet), only 107 bald eagles would equate to the length of a single football field. However, if you used an average longitudinal length of 86.5 cm for the American bald eagle, one football field would equate to approximately 127 bald eagles in length, and then you have a rounding error that has crept into your calculations.
  - louthy 3y ago
    > the earthquake extended the coastline by as much as 250 meters, I took the 250 metres (I know, I know ... a 'metre' is approximately 0.2 Ford Mustangs), and the wingspan of a bald eagle of 1.8 metres (1 Steven Spielberg). Divide the two numbers and you get 138 bald eagles. Rounding errors in unit translation may have occurred.
    - rad_gruchalski 3y ago
      > and the wingspan of a bald eagle of 1.8 metres (1 Steven Spielberg) But Spielberg’s height is 1.72m. Did you mean Taylor Swift, Brad Pitt, or Leonardo DiCaprio?
      - louthy 3y ago
        “Rounding errors in unit translation may have occurred.”
johnwalkr 3y ago
I was ready to defend it this time, because for area, it isn't intuitive to grasp square metres or kilometres for irregular shapes. But in fact they are using it for length here. Maybe I still want to defend it as it does give me a mental visual image and practically everyone has the experience of watching a variety of football and/or playing a variety of football.
- mulmen 3y ago
  I think it works here because it gives a sense like "imagine two new football fields showed up on your local coastline". But then maybe that's not the right sense. It could be true for miles of coastline. Regardless it is a significant change.
- CosmicShadow 3y ago
  Maybe practically everyone "in America"
  - johnwalkr 3y ago
    By "variety of football" I meant American football and football/soccer. The lengths of both fields is about the same.
    - averageRoyalty 3y ago
      You say that, but I have no idea how long those. If we played soccer, we'd play it at the local footy oval[0]. I don't know anyone who plays gridiron ("American Football"), but I assume they'd play that there too. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football_playing_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_rules_football_play...
    - Grimpen 3y ago
      I did a "Sportsball Fields" conversion tool for calculator. Only thing is it assumes area, not length. It lets me convert between regulation fields for National Football League, International Football Association Board, Canadian Football League, Rugby Union (max and min permissible), Rugby League (max & min) plus curling, and ice hockey (NFL and IIHF). Just need to figure out Australian Rules Football. And then sorry do it all over for length. Anything but metric.
behnamoh 3y ago
I mean, the fact that they even had to use "football" fields as a measure of size was obviously an American thing! It's common to hear that on the news here. The other day there was news about a hole the size of a "fridge" on a street... The lengths Americans go to avoid the metric system :)
- rootusrootus 3y ago
  You know why Americans call soccer soccer? Because Britain. Pick a name and stick with it, dammit.
mulmen 3y ago
250 meters is 273 yards. An American football field is generally understood to be 100 yards in this context but the article claims a distance of 2.2 football fields. 273/100 is 2.7 fields. 273/2.2 is 124 yards per field. Are they using the total length with endzones? That's a confusing definition. They could have just said "roughly two football fields" and been fine. But then they did the math and made it more confusing.

_n_b_ 3y ago

But... the length of a coastline is famously not definitively measurable. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox)

tavavex 3y ago
I think this article refers to some areas rising enough to have the coast move back by about 250m, not to an increase in length of the entire Japanese coastline.
vidarh 3y ago
It does not have a well defined length in itself, but as soon as you define a method of measurement that problem goes away, so assuming the same method has been used for the old and new number there is no problem.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
philipov 3y ago
You can still say that the perimeter definitively got longer. Just add a parameter epsilon greater than zero for each possible way of measuring it, so that all of them are longer by some indefinite amount.
jncfhnb 3y ago
It’s lower boundable though

anothernerd 3y ago

Sometimes, american measuring systems make me want to slap myself

doublerabbit 3y ago
I bought a new tape measure for DIY, it still has millimetres as a measurement. Sure. I am totally going to measure my new bookshelf in mm.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Aren't the marked in between the centimetres? And aren't they useful if you're working with something that was originally measured in inches and you're doing a lot of cuts of 2.54cm etc.?
- askvictor 3y ago
  If you're going to pick one unit for unambiguous measurements for most day-to-day use, you could do a lot worse than mm.
- mulmen 3y ago
  I have never seen a tape measure in the US without both scales.
- freetime2 3y ago
  I have a tape measure in mm and have absolutely no issue using it to measure things up to 5m in length. It’s trivial to convert in your head between mm, cm, and meters and record whatever unit makes the most sense. Or it’s also fine to just work in mm for largish objects - anyone with any experience with metric units should have no trouble visualizing a car, for example, that is 4,555 mm long. And car dimensions are routinely given in mm by manufacturers on websites, pamphlets, etc for use by the general public. So I think mm should be just fine for a bookshelf, unless it’s 10+ meters long. BTW I am an American who grew up using feet/inches, and am now a total metric system convert. I too grow tired of the endless snarky remarks every time someone uses a non-SI unit on the internet, but let’s not delude ourselves into thinking the US way (and other countries who still use non-SI units for certain applications, the US isn’t the only one although it is perhaps the worst offender) of doing things is somehow better. It’s just the convention that people are familiar with in the US.

karlzt 3y ago

Japan needs more territory so the earth is giving them more.

eggy 3y ago
They don't because the birth rate tanked, and besides China is going to claim the new land as originally part of the Seventh Kingdom and invade it after Taiwan.

tavavex 3y ago

It's really strange how "football fields" or "Olympic swimming pools" etc became such common comparison points for news headlines. Isn't the universality kind of the appeal of having units of measurement? I'd argue most people see things that are a meter long a lot more often than football fields.

mlacks 3y ago
For me, a few hundred meters is difficult to comceptualize. I can search a football arena and notice the people around/inside it and get a better feel for the story than if just presented in meters
grrowl 3y ago
Pumping up the grandiose factor; a meter is tangible and can be imagined 100x, but football fields are really big!
makeitdouble 3y ago
To me the point of these is not to explain size but more to address the feeling of "it's bigger than the biggest thing you might have experienced" An other common reference in Japan is the Tokyo Dome baseball stadium also used for live performances, and it feels exactly the same as telling someone you store 5 Library of Congress worth of data in your NAS.
johnwalkr 3y ago
I propose using multiples of 1% of the length of the 100m dash. Maybe we can find a shorthand way to write it.
philipwhiuk 3y ago
It's also weird to use a football field as a unit of length not area.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Not really, as in American football, the goal is to traverse some specific length, so no one really thinks about the area in much detail. For example, I could tell you that a football field is 120 yards in length (100 yards for the actual play area and 10 yards on each side for the endzone) but I could not tell you the width off the top of my head.

rkagerer 3y ago

Has the opposite ever occurred, causing someone's entire house & property to become permenantly submerged underwater? Are there any insurance riders that'd cover such an event, or would affected individuals be entirely at the mercy of gov't disaster relief contingencies / personal savings?

throwup238 3y ago
The only thing I can think of is Hawaii’s lava flows, which can essentially “pave over” plots of land or even entire neighborhoods. To my knowledge no one will insure that kind of damage, just general insurance for any buildings on the property.
philipwhiuk 3y ago
Coastal erosion happens all the time. And yes, it's either covered under property insurance or your house is uninsurable, depending on the known risk when you buy/renew the insurance.
darkhorn 3y ago
Yes, 1999 Turkey eartquake. And 2023 Turkey eartquake.
dotnet00 3y ago
Not an entirely permanent case, but I remember seeing a documentary about people living on shifting river deltas in Bangladesh, where the land they 'own' can get submerged for some years, forcing them to make a temporary house elsewhere, but able to go back and rebuild when/if the land re-emerges. But insurance is of course not really involved because the people living in these circumstances are typically not so well off. IIRC government relief is also not really much of a thing for those communities. They just rely on each other, knowing that by helping others in the community, they'll get help in return when they need it.

numpad0 3y ago

There is at least one fishery port that had just become a breakwater built on land. Insane. 1: https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/fdc126664613350e8448eed52c5700c51dc42b36/images/000 https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/fdc126664613350e8448eed52c...

freetime2 3y ago

This earthquake has been really devastating for the Noto peninsula. 128 confirmed deaths so far, with 195 people still reported as missing/unconfirmed. 28,000 people have evacuated to shelters, and many more are without power and water in their homes. And right now it is snowing, compounding the suffering for people without power, and complicating cleanup efforts. [1] A lot of the infrastucture has been destroyed in the area, and 2,000 people are isolated due to roads being impassable. Fishing is one of the primary industries in the area, and many boats and coastal buildings were lost/damaged in the resulting tsunami. And with the coast having risen by up to 4m in some areas, there are ports which are no longer even accessible by boat. Most of the people worst affected have been the elderly. More than 50% of the population in the area is over the age of 65. And older people are more likely to live in older homes that are more susceptible to damage in an earthquake. And there are reports of covid and the flu spreading at evacuation centers. Over the past several years there has been an "earthquake swarm" in the area. Experts have speculated that it is due to water seeping into the earth's crust along with a subducting oceanic plate, causing swelling, weakening bedrock, and making faults more "slippery". [2] The Jan 1 earthquake occurred over a far wider area than previous quakes in the region, starting in the Suzu area and spreading to other active faults in the area. [3] Experts are advising that, while considerable stress has been released from this event, people should be on alert for more quakes in the future including the possibility of another magnitude 7+ quake. [1] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240108_02/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240108_02/ [2] https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14515789 https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14515789 [3] https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2944/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/2944/

SenHeng 3y ago
Noto has been the main new piece for good reasons, but other areas are suffering too. Niigata has undergone severe liquification. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240102_27/ https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240102_27/

GuB-42 3y ago

> Japan's earthquake alters coastline, extends it by two football fields. Extending the coastline by 250m is one thing, but having football fields appear just like that really is something. I hope the energy released by the earthquake didn't result in the appearance of a bunch of Hiroshima bombs.

undefeated 3y ago

Anything but the metric system