M7.3 Earthquake off Eastern Coast of Tohoku, Japan 12/7/2012
It was just reported that a M7.3 earthquake struck at 8:18:25 GMT off the eastern coast of Japan, in the area of the March 11, 2011 event. A 1 meter tsunami was reported as well, with at least 1 M6.2 aftershock. We had been expecting an event rather like this one, as shown by the figure below. I am still at the AGU meeting where a most interesting set of presentations on the March 11 event were given yesterday.
The figure at left below is a time series of the chance of an M>7.25 earthquake in the Japan region during the next year from 12/6/2012. It can be seen that the computed chance of the event (as determined on 11/30/2012) was about 82%, quite high. The image at right below is a screen shot of the probability contours from the earthquake viewer with the cluster of mainshock + aftershocks indicated by the orange arrow. Both images (without the earthquake cluster) can be seen on the poster I presented last monday, shown in my blog posted here previously on 11/27/2012.
About OpenHazards Bloggers
Steven Ward is a Research Geophysicist at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UC Santa Cruz. He specializes in the quantification and simulation of natural hazards. Read Steve's blog.
John Rundle is a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Geology at UC Davis and the Executive Director of the APEC Collaboration for Earthquake Simulations. He chaired the Board of Advisors for the Southern California Earthquake Center from 1994 to 1996. Read John's blog.