The seafloor lurched fifty metres sideways. It shoved the main island of Japan eight feet east, nudged the Earth's axis by a hand's width, and triggered the Fukushima disaster.
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DownloadThe 2011 Tohoku earthquake struck on March 11, 2011, registering magnitude 9.1 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 44,668× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 38.30°N, 142.37°E, at a depth of about 29 km — a shallow crustal earthquake. Shallow earthquakes like this release their energy close to the surface, which is why the shaking near the epicenter was so violent.
An estimated 18,423 people were killed.