Rare Video: Japan Tsunami | National Geographic

all across northern Japan they felt it a violent magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11 2011 it was centered about 80 miles offshore and tsunami warnings went up immediately in coastal cities people knew what to do next run to higher ground it's from these vantage points on hills and in tall buildings that incredible footage was captured in Kesennuma people retreated to a high-rise rooftop and could only watch in horror as tsunami waves inundated their city knocking buildings into rubble and mixing into a kind of tsunami soup filled with vehicles building parts and contents seawater cascaded over sea walls and into cities this video shows the water rushing over an 18-foot seawall in the comedy city the seawall here was the world's deepest and largest but not enough for the magnitude of the March 11 disaster it was the largest quake ever known in Japan and one of the five largest reported in the world more than 28,000 people are confirmed dead or missing when two tectonic plates pushed together under the sea the resulting earthquake sends an enormous burst of energy up through the ocean displacing enormous quantities of water with the upward motion a series of waves expands in all directions in deep water these waves travel fast up to five hundred miles an hour but only reach a height of a few feet a passing ship might not even notice but as the waves enter shallow waters friction with the ocean floor lowers the wave speed but raises them this video is from a Japan Coast Guard ship confronting a tsunami wave in shallow water on March 11 and a rare view from the air video of a tsunami wave approaching the shoreline in Japan some tsunami waves reached as far as 3 miles inland Japan may be the most seismological II studied country in the world and with more than 1,200 high-precision GPS stations a geophysicist at the University of Alaska used the data to create a visualization of the March 11 quake the waves of displacement that you see we're moving as fast as 5 miles per second in this photo the ripples of tsunami waves are seen moving upstream in the naka river at Hitachi naka city new technology left an enormous amount of visual evidence for studying years to come and can perhaps help us better understand the power of earthquakes and tsunamis and prevent loss of life in the future [Music]

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 70,835,312

Rating: 4.8248501 out of 5

Keywords: National Geographic, tsunami, Japan, 2011, earthquake, disaster, destruction, rubble, news, rare, footage, eyewitness, earthquakes, today

Id: oWzdgBNfhQU

Length: 3min 35sec (215 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 13 2011