My First Tsunami

This morning I woke up at 8.30 for my first class, turned on the TV to help switch my brain on, and was confronted with a tsunami warning! That certainly helped me wake up!

The cause was a powerful earthquake (magnitude 8.3) near Samoa that happened during the early hours of this morning. The earthquake triggered tsunamis in various areas of the South Pacific, and the Asia-Pacific region (including China, Japan and South-East Asia) all had tsunami warnings.

On the news it said that the tsunami was likely to hit Japan at around noon, from Okinawa in the south, all the way up the Pacific coast to Hokkaido in the north. However, Tokyo is shielded from tsunamis by Chiba prefecture, which juts out at a convenient angle. The tsunami was only meant to be 50cm high, which would cause moderate damage at worse, so I wasn't at all worried about it.

When it actually hit the Japanese coast, it was more like 10cm, so there was no damage to speak of. I'm not sure about other places in the Asia-Pacific, but the South Pacific islands were devastated by 4.5m high waves and aftershocks. At the moment, over 80 people have been killed and thousands made homeless, mainly in Samoa and American Samoa.

It reminded me that this part of the world is much more volatile than Britain! I haven't felt any earthquakes this time yet, which I'm very surprised about, as there are lots here! There have even been earthquakes in Tokyo prefecture, but so small I didn't feel them. I'm just waiting until the first big one!

So I survived my first tsunami (津波), which is good!

If you're interested, here's the news story I got my information from.

And here's the Japan Meteorological Agency's website, which I use for weather, tsunami, earthquake and volcano information.