Earthquakes and Tremors

Japan’s disaster history is long and deadly, with over a thousand earthquakes a year and many very high magnitude, there have been hundreds of thousands of fatalities on this island. The earthquakes of Japan happen often, the tremors sometimes daily. In just one year these small earthquakes can number into the thousands. Lasting days and sometimes weeks, they follow the strikes that lay across Japan as a result of the subduction zone. Not just following these crossing lines, the tremors can spread at rates of ten kilometers a day. In 2000 and 2001 the tremors began directly after earthquakes ranging from 4.0 to 6.7 while some ceased immediately after other earthquakes ended. 18 years, from 1990 to 2008, there have been constant earthquakes with the most recent one in July of 2008, causing fatalities, landslides, hundreds of homes destroyed, and power outages to over 8 thousand homes.
Though the earthquakes and tremors, caused by the scraping of the plates as they override each other, can be terrible now, the most fatal of all earthquakes can be found in Japan’s past. With records going to at least the twelve hundreds, there have been single earthquakes that kill hundreds of thousands of people in one quake. The most devastating modern earthquake happened in 1923 in Tokyo and Yokohama. On September 1st, an 8.3 earthquake hit that destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings. Yet since it struck at noon, the danger was even more catastrophic. With homes made of paper and wood, and with the building built so close together, the chance for disaster is eminent. The time of the earthquake was the time for cooking lunch, with open flames inside the homes, there was no chance to stop what would come next. The heat from the fires was so intense a cyclone began to form. Through the wreckage of the homes and several hundred thousand dead, the cyclone of fire moved and destroyed all that was left of the town. People fled to the bodies of water but could not escape the cyclone since all the oxygen was stripped from the area around the cone of fire.
These stories are not that rare with Japan building skyward for lack of land the dangers increase. One earthquake was so violent that the plates moved several feet in one violent shudder. With the plates slipping under each other and constant new sea floor being created it is not just the earthquakes that are a fear of the Japanese.