Time to rethink megaquakes

19 April 2011

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FOR more than 1000 years, we have known that the seas off the coast of Sendai in Japan
can turn treacherous. An account of how one quake unleashed a flood that swept away a
castle town can be found in Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku (The True History of Three Reigns of
Japan), completed in AD 901 for the emperor.
The tsunami of AD 869 was found to have twice the reach of 20th-century inundations
when Koji Minoura and colleagues from Tohoku University in Japan dug in rice paddies
and discovered marine sediments 4 kilometres inland. "The possibility of a large tsunami
striking the Sendai Plain is high," they concluded in the Journal of Natural Disaster
Science in 2001.
Their paper calculated a magnitude-8.3 earthquake was responsible and that a similar
event could recur at 1000-year intervals. Sendai was indeed struck in 1933 by a
magnitude-8.4 quake that created 15 metre waves. On 11 March this year the area was
again devastated by a tsunami.
Unfortunately, the growing awareness of the risks had little impact on tsunami
preparedness, or the safety assessment of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Aside from highlighting the lag between scientific insights and their use in disaster
mitigation, it now seems that the implications go even wider, according to the first
analyses of what is fast becoming the most comprehensively studied megaquake of all
time.
Geologists have never observed such a complex rupture pattern before; one that ripped
through an ageing piece of crust and, with it, tenets of earthquake geology (see "Starburst
megaquake: Japan quake overturns geology theories") . The new data show how
magnitude-9 events can explode in ancient, sluggish subduction faults that were
previously thought immune to megathrust quakes.
Fault zones near Tonga and the Mariana Islands are routinely shaken by earthquakes
between magnitude 5 and 7, as old crust collides with and slides under a continental
plate, yet many assume a magnitude-9 event is unlikely in these subduction zones, says
Matt Pritchard of Cornell University.
Time to think again. Like the tsunamis that have flooded the plains of north-east Japan,
the impact of the new understanding will be felt far beyond Sendai.