The wave that washed over the eastern coast of Japan was more than 130 feet high.

You would expect that a disaster of the magnitude of the Tohoku tsunami and earthquake, which killed 15,000 people and caused about $210 billion in property damage, would have people feeling more apt to evacuate when another killer wave approaches. But, strikingly, scientists who interviewed Japanese people a year before the event and afterwards found that the size of the waves they would think dangerous enough to flee had grown. As Adam Mann writes at Wired, people had stopped recognizing the height at which a wave becomes dangerous:

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The National Palace in Port-au-Prince
after the 2010 Haiti earthquake

What’s the News: To dampen structural vibrations from earthquakes, engineers often place a flexible layer of rubber bearings in between buildings and the soil. Now, scientists are learning that Mother Nature uses a similar technique. A research team has found that a buried layer of mangrove in the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe absorbs earthquake energy, shielding the above ground from soil liquefaction. This discovery could be exploited to help protect new buildings in the Caribbean islands.

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A house decimated by the 2010 earthquake in Chile.

What’s the News: Enormous earthquakes are rare; there have been only seven quakes with a magnitude 8.8 or above since the start of the 20th century. Of those seven quakes, three of them have happened in the past seven years: off the coasts of Indonesia in 2004, Chile in 2010, and Japan last month. Some researchers think this earthquake cluster marks the start of a period of megaquakes, while others believe that the earthquake cluster is simply a statistical fluke, with these unusually massive quakes just happening to occur within a short amount of time, according to recent analyses (PDF) of Earth’s earthquake history presented at the Seismological Society of America’s annual meeting last week.

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Reactor 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, on March 24

What’s the News: A non-peer-reviewed study (pdf) publicized last week by radioactivity-detection expert Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress suggests that nuclear fission reactions continued at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power station well after the plant’s operators had allegedly shut down the reactors there. The paper says there may be what are called “localized criticalities” have occurred in the plutonium and uranium left in the reactors—little pockets of fuel that have gone critical, propagating the nuclear chain reaction and generating potentially harmful radiation. The existence of criticalities is controversial: some researchers say there are certainly none; Dalnoki-Veress himself says it’s only a possibility.

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• Japan update: Engineers have successfully attached power lines to Fukushima’s reactor 2—a major development that should allow the pumps to cool the core.  Still others warn that the reactor cores aren’t what’s really dangerous: It’s the spend fuel rods that we should be worrying about.
• In less lethal news, scientists have created the first permanent anti-fog coating for glass and plastic surfaces. The days to steamy ski goggles and fog-strewn windshields may be coming to a close.
• Monkey see, monkey recognize: Scientist have demonstrated that monkeys can discern the faces of their friends—the creature spent more time staring at unfamiliar animals. The very fact that the monkeys took interest and scrutinized the photos are what surprised them the most.
• Turning the tides on carbon emissions: Scotland plans on installing the world’s largest tidal-power array. Ten underwater turbines will provide enough electricity for up to 10,000 homes, more than two times the electricity needs of two small islands.
• No more space limbo: Europe has finally figured out funding arrangements to extend operations for the International Space Station till 2020.

Image: flickr / daveeza

Oil refineries aflame. Train tracks twisted like string. Buildings ripped from their foundations. Japan’s 8.9-magnitude earthquake has left its mark, especially in the expected death toll of over 1,000 people. This video roundup shows the science behind what happened today in Japan.

Why (Most) Buildings Didn’t Crumble

The death toll is estimated around 1,000, which is bad enough, but it would have been much higher without good engineering, mandated by strict building codes. But these codes haven’t been strict for long. In the 7.3-magnitude Kobe earthquake in 1995, 6,500 Japanese people died, and engineers looked on in horror as many buildings came crashing down; the most deadly ones were built before 1981, when building standards were still lower.

The Kobe tragedy, says The Telegraph‘s Peter Foster, compelled Japanese officials to tighten building regulations for residential offices and transportation infrastructure. Engineers made buildings  “earthquake proof” by outfitting them with “deep foundation and massive shock absorbers that dampen seismic energy,” and by enabling the bases of buildings to move “semi-independently to its superstructure, reducing the shaking caused by a quake.” Skyscrapers now sway during an earthquake but don’t collapse, Foster says, and that helps explain why damage to buildings in Tokyo was kept to a minimum this time around. [The Atlantic Wire]

Why Couldn’t Geologists Predict It?

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Japan’s massive earthquake today may be over, but we’re still feeling the effects, from nuclear reactor scares in Japan to tsunami warnings along the entire west coast of North America, from Mexico to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Much is still unknown about this earthquake, including official destruction assessments and total death tolls, but here’s what we do know:

Two preliminary earthquakes with magnitudes of 7.2 and 6.3  struck off the coast of Honshu, Japan, the day before the major blow: This 8.9-magnitude quake—the largest in Japan’s recorded history—struck at 2:46 pm local time on Friday, its epicenter located about 231 miles northeast of Tokyo at a depth of 15 miles. Even after this large one, over thirty aftershocks—the strongest measuring 7.1 in magnitude—continued to batter the island nation.

The Immediate Effects

Fires and collapsed buildings were the main cause of injuries and death early on, from conflagrations sweeping an oil refinery in Chiba prefecture near Tokyo to the roof collapsing during a graduation ceremony in Tokyo. But fears soon centered on Japan’s nuclear facilities: Four power plants successfully shut down, but one experienced problems:

According to Nature’s Tokyo correspondent, David Cyranoski, Japanese media are reporting that the emergency core cooling system (ECCS) at the Fukushima #1 plant is not working due to a loss of electrical power, and problems with the backup diesel generator. The reactor is currently relying on an alternate cooling system that circulates water using a pump system. This system can operate for about 7 to 8 hours. According to the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency of the government’s industry ministry, this is the first time in Japan that the ECCS of a nuclear power station has not functioned. [Nature]

The local governments near the Fukushima plant urged the area’s 2,000 residents to evacuate, though no leaks have been detected and the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum assured everyone (pdf) that Fukushima reactor’s core “still has a sufficient amount of water for cooling, with no danger of the nuclear fuel being exposed”.

Why It Could Have Been Worse

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At least 65 people died in an earthquake that struck New Zealand’s second-largest city, Christchurch, yesterday. As the city digs out from the rubble created by the magnitude 6.3 quake, some there are worried the death toll could climb into the hundreds. And as seismologists unravel the details, it’s becoming clear why this quake was so much deadlier than previous seismic events in New Zealand.

Photographs and video from Christchurch, a metropolitan area of nearly 400,000 residents, showed people running through the streets, landslides pouring rocks and debris into suburban streets and extensive damage to buildings. Witnesses told of watching the spire of the iconic Christchurch Cathedral come crashing down during an aftershock. One witness called it “the most frightening thing of my entire life,” and television footage showed a person clinging to a window in the cathedral’s steeple. [The New York Times]

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One cannot look at a single storm, flood, or drought and say conclusively, “climate change caused that.” But what researchers are attempting to do lately is climate change risk assessment—figuring out how much more likely severe events may become as our world continues to warm up. Two new studies in Nature today try to do just that with heavy rains and flooding, saying definitively that warm temperatures make these events more likely.

More-localized weather extremes have been harder to attribute to climate change until now. “Climate models have improved a lot since ten years ago, when we basically couldn’t say anything about rainfall,” says Gabriele Hegerl, a climate researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK. [Nature]

Hegerl and climate researcher Francis Zwiers were authors on study number one, a broad-based look at how much humans are contributing to intense precipitation events in the Northern Hemisphere. The simple physics of it makes sense: warmer air can hold more water. To show a link, however, the researchers pulled together a half-century of rainfall records, which they compared to the results of eight different climate models.

Richard Allan, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in England who was not part of the study, called the method employed by Zwiers “very rigorous.” He added, “There’s already been quite a bit of evidence showing that there has been an intensification of rainfall” events across the globe. But until now “there had not been a study that formally identified this human effect on precipitation extremes,” Zwiers said. “This paper provides specific scientific evidence that this is indeed the case.” [Washington Post]

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Chile’s earthquake woes seem to know no end. Geologists are now saying that Chile’s deadly 2010 quake may have actually increased the risk of another destructive one.

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck last February relieved seismic stress in some areas–such as southern Santiago–but not in an area dubbed the “Darwin gap,” which lies on the coastal area near Concepcion, according to a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

To see if the 2010 quake might have helped release pent-up stress in the Darwin gap, scientists modeled how it might have affected the gap by analyzing tsunami readings gathered by gauges in the water and land observations taken by satellite, GPS and the human eye…. The investigators found the earthquake ruptured only part of the Darwin gap. An area of stored energy remains unbroken there, and the 2010 earthquake might have actually stressed it further…. [Said study coauthor Stefano Lorito]: “A new magnitude 7 to 8 earthquake might be expected in that region.” [OurAmazingPlanet]

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The Permian extinction event was the biggest shake-up of life that Earth has ever seen: in the “Great Dying” that took place 250 million years ago, more than 90 percent of marine species were killed and about 70 percent of land animals vanished. The cause of this catastrophe has been debated for years, but new research suggests that volcanic eruptions triggered massive coal fires that pumped pollution into the air, eventually poisoning the planet.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience, is based on new findings from arctic rocks that date back to the Permian period, when all of the planet’s land masses formed a supercontinent called Pangaea. When the researchers analyzed the rocks, they found signs of a coal-based apocalypse.

Besides the usual miniscule clumps of organic matter, they also found tiny bubble-filled particles called cenospheres. These frothy little blobs form only when molten coal spews into the atmosphere, the researchers say…. [The cenospheres] must have been created when massive amounts of molten rock—more than 1 trillion metric tons—erupted through overlying coal deposits in Siberia to form lava deposits known as the Siberian Traps. [ScienceNOW]

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The flooding created by enormous downpours near Brisbane in eastern Australia shows no signs of abating, and that region is now bracing for things to go from bad to worse.

Heavy rains pounded Brisbane’s region, called Queensland, in December. And things really started to get bad yesterday, when flooding caused by the constant rain sent a wall of water—evocatively being called an “inland tsunami”—crashing through the nearby town of Toowoomba. Brisbane, which is Australia’s third-largest city at about two million people, in next in the crosshairs.

Normally it is protected from periodic flooding of the Brisbane river by the Wivenhoe dam, 80 kilometres [50 miles] away. But Wivenhoe is already 81 per cent over capacity after last month’s heavy rains saturated Queensland. To save Brisbane from flooding, officials began releasing water from Wivenhoe last month. But because of the inland tsunami now hurtling towards the city, officials have increased the amount of water released from 140 million tonnes yesterday to 344 million tonnes today. [New Scientist]

But there’s only so much they can do. As of this morning, the Christian Science Monitor reports at least 30 deaths and 78 missing, with the number expected to grow as flooding threatens Brisbane.

[Brisbane] Mayor Campbell Newman warned 6,500 homes, businesses and other properties were likely to be flooded by Thursday. “Today is very significant, tomorrow is bad, and Thursday is going to be devastating for the residents and businesses affected,” he said. [BBC News]

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It’s beginning to look a lot like… self-inflicted doom.

This week Associated Press reporters tallied the toll of the year in natural disasters, and it added up to some depressing results. Around the world—in Haiti and Chile earthquakes, in Pakistani floods, in Russian heat waves—nature unleashed its fury in extreme fashion in 2010, the AP says, and humans made it worse through our own actions.

“It just seemed like it was back-to-back and it came in waves,” said Craig Fugate, who heads the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency. It handled a record number of disasters in 2010. “The term ’100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.” [AP]

At least 250,000 people died in natural disasters this year, up from just 15,000 last year. But, the AP’s Seth Bornstein argues, this isn’t just natural variability.

For one thing, there are the avoidable problems of not doing enough to prepare for the inevitable appearance of disaster. The 2010 death toll is skewed so high this year because of the Haiti earthquake in January that killed most of the people in that quarter-million group. There’s nothing to be done about the shifts of tectonic plates, but the death toll skyrocketed because so many poor Haitians were living in such poorly built dwellings. The more powerful Chilean earthquake, by contrast, occurred in a place with better-built structures and killed fewer than a thousand. While in Pakistan, having so many homes in the flood zone exacerbated the damage when the monsoons came in July.

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In those volcanoes that kids (or their parents) build for elementary school science fairs, the style is generally simple: There’s one chamber in which the baking soda rests, ready to meet the vinegar and erupt. Most real volcanoes are a little like this, in that they have a single magma chamber that fuels their eruptions.

But not Eyjafjallajökull.

The Icelandic volcano that stirred in March and grounded European air travel has a peculiar kind of plumbing, scientists report today in Nature. Freysteinn Sigmundsson and colleagues combined 20 years’ worth of GPS, satellite, and seismic observations of the volcano see note how it changed over the years—and especially what was happening in the lead-up to this year’s eruption.

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Every year, the coming of warmer weather in the spring brings with it the scientific parlor game of predicting how many storms the impending Atlantic hurricane season will bring. But could meteorological prognosticators soon begin to predict storms years in advance, and not just months, with some accuracy?

It is possible, a team led by Doug Smith of the U.K.’s Met Office says. In a study in Nature Geoscience, Smith essentially modeled the climate of past to see if the team’s system accurately predicted the Atlantic hurricane season.

The researchers used nine versions of its decadal prediction model to “hindcast” Atlantic hurricanes each year from 1960 to 2007. The model was set to May 1 for each of those years and then was asked how many storms would come that season. Averaging across the nine versions, the model results closely matched the changing number of hurricanes that occurred over those decades. Smith says: “We’ve found that there is some skill there.” [Science News]

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