Data from Tohoku earthquake offer new insights

Clues from joint inversion of tsunami and geodetic data of the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake

The 2011 Tohoku-oki (Mw 9.1) earthquake is so far the best-observed megathrust rupture, which allowed the collection of unprecedented offshore data. The joint inversion of tsunami waveforms (DART buoys, bottom pressure sensors, coastal wave gauges, and GPS-buoys) and static geodetic data (onshore GPS, seafloor displacements obtained by a GPS/acoustic combination technique), allows us to retriev...

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake and devastating tsunami.

At 14:46 on March 11, 2011, the magnitude-9.0 earthquake attacked Sendai and neighboring cities distributed along the northeast coast of Honshu Island, Japan. Its epicenter is located 130 km east of Sendai (Fig. 1). Unfortunate ly, the strong earthquake generated devastating tsunamis that destroyed many towns and villages near the seashore in Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures. The natura...

The 2015 Gorkha Nepal Earthquake: Insights from Earthquake Damage Survey

The 2015 Gorkha Nepal earthquake caused tremendous damage and loss. To gain valuable lessons from this tragic event, an earthquake damage investigation team was dispatched to Nepal from 1 May 2015 to 7 May 2015. A unique aspect of the earthquake damage investigation is that first-hand earthquake damage data were obtained 6–11 days after the mainshock. To gain deeper understanding of the observe...

Insights from the great 2011 Japan earthquake

Structural control on the Tohoku earthquake rupture process investigated by 3D FEM, tsunami and geodetic data

The 2011 Tohoku earthquake (Mw = 9.1) highlighted previously unobserved features for megathrust events, such as the large slip in a relatively limited area and the shallow rupture propagation. We use a Finite Element Model (FEM), taking into account the 3D geometrical and structural complexities up to the trench zone, and perform a joint inversion of tsunami and geodetic data to retrieve the ea...