Important Takeaways:
- The Japanese government warns of an 80% chance of a magnitude 9 Nankai Trough earthquake in 30 years, potentially killing 300,000 people.
- Tsunami waves up to 34 meters [111.54 ft] could devastate coastal cities, displacing 12.3 million and destroying 2.35 million buildings.
- The economic toll could reach $1.44 trillion, nearly half of Japan’s GDP, with long-term global supply chain disruptions.
- Evacuation improvements could reduce deaths, but current preparedness remains insufficient to meet government safety targets.
- Past disasters like Fukushima highlight the severe risks of nuclear and environmental crises from such an event.
- The Nankai Trough, a 600-mile (900 km) deep ocean trench, is a region where the Philippine Sea Plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian Plate. This tectonic boundary has historically produced megaquakes every 100 to 200 years. The last major event occurred in 1946, making the region overdue for another significant tremor. The Japanese government’s latest estimates, updated for the first time since 2013, account for inflationary pressures and advanced topographical data, which have expanded the anticipated flood areas.
- The 2011 Tohoku earthquake, a magnitude 9 event, killed over 15,500 people and caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. The tsunami waves reached heights of up to 40 meters in some areas, causing widespread destruction and environmental contamination. The Nankai Trough megaquake could be even more devastating, with the potential to surpass the 2011 disaster in both scale and impact.
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Important Takeaways:
- A POWERFUL magnitude 6.9 earthquake has rattled Papua New Guinea, triggering a tsunami warning for coastal areas.
- The shallow quake struck just 120 miles east of Kimbe, a coastal town in the New Britain region, around 9.04 pm local time, the US Geological Survey (USGS) said.
- The epicenter was offshore, at a depth of just six miles, amplifying tsunami fears.
- The USGS warned that waves between one to three meters could slam into parts of Papua New Guinea’s coastline, while a separate advisory for the Solomon Islands cautioned about possible waves up to 0.3 meters.
- There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, but authorities remain on high alert.
- The European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre (EMSC) pegged the quake at magnitude 7.1, deeper at 49 km, highlighting slight discrepancies in early readings.
- It comes just days after a horror 7.7 magnitude earthquake ripped through Myanmar, with tremors being felt all the way in Bangkok, Thailand.
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Important Takeaways:
- More than 3,000 people have now died from the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck Burma last week, which destroyed thousands of buildings and sent the war-torn country into a deeper humanitarian crisis.
- Burma’s military-led government announced that the death toll from Friday’s earthquake rose to 3,085, while 4,715 people were injured and another 341 are missing.
- “With infrastructure compromised and patient numbers surging, access to health care has become nearly impossible in many of the worst-hit areas,” according to the U.N. “Thousands of people are in urgent need of trauma care, surgical interventions and treatment for disease outbreaks.”
- The World Health Organization assessed so far that four hospitals and one health center had been completely destroyed, while another 32 hospitals and 18 health centers had been partially damaged.
- More than 1,550 international rescuers were operating alongside locals on Thursday, according to a statement from the military. Rescue supplies and equipment have been sent by 17 countries.
- The quake worsened an already dire humanitarian crisis, with more than 3 million people displaced from their homes and nearly 20 million in need even before it hit, according to the U.N.
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Important Takeaways:
- Rescue workers saved a 63-year-old woman from the rubble of a building in Myanmar’s capital on Tuesday, but hope was fading of finding many more survivors of the violent earthquake that killed more than 2,700 people, compounding a humanitarian crisis caused by a civil war.
- The fire department in Naypyitaw said the woman was successfully pulled from the rubble 91 hours after being buried when the building collapsed in the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that hit midday Friday. Experts say the likelihood of finding survivors drops dramatically after 72 hours.
- The head of Myanmar’s military government, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, told a forum in Naypyitaw, that 2,719 people have now been found dead, with 4,521 others injured and 441 missing, Myanmar’s Western News online portal reported.
- Those figures are widely expected to rise, but the earthquake hit a wide swath of the country, leaving many areas without power, telephone or cell connections and damaging roads and bridges, leaving the full extent of the devastation hard to assess.
- Most of the reports so far have come from Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city, which was near the epicenter of the earthquake, and Naypyitaw.
- “The window for lifesaving response is closing. Across the affected areas, families are facing acute shortages of clean water, food, and medical supplies.”
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Important Takeaways:
- A 7.0 magnitude earthquake near the island nation of Tonga led to a tsunami warning for the Pacific Island country in the early morning hours of Monday local time.
- The U.S. Geological Survey reported that the quake struck about 55 miles southeast of Pangai in the early morning hours of Monday. Pangai is home to the principal port of the Ha’apai Group of islands of Tonga.
- The warning has since been lifted.
- Tsunami waves were later observed but were not extreme and were forecast to be less than three feet above the tide level. The tsunami warning was soon lifted and there were no immediate reports of damage.
- A few hours later, a second quake with a magnitude of 6.1 hit in the same area. Tonga is made up of more than 170 islands in Polynesia, many of them uninhabited. With a population of just over 100,000, most people live on the main island of Tongatapu. Tongatapu is about 2,000 miles off Australia’s east coast.
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Important Takeaways:
- Survivors were pulled out of rubble in Myanmar and signs of life were detected in the ruins of a skyscraper in Bangkok on Monday as efforts intensified to find people trapped three days after a massive earthquake in Southeast Asia that killed at least 2,000.
- Rescuers freed four people, including a pregnant woman and a girl, from collapsed buildings in Mandalay, the city in central Myanmar near the epicenter of Friday’s 7.7-magnitude earthquake, China’s Xinhua news agency reported.
- Civil war in Myanmar, where a military junta seized power in a coup in 2021, was complicating efforts to reach those injured and made homeless by the Southeast Asian nation’s biggest quake in a century.
- “Access to all victims is an issue … given the conflict situation. There are a lot of security issues to access some areas across the front lines in particular,”
- One rebel group said Myanmar’s ruling military was still conducting airstrikes on villages in the aftermath of the quake, and Singapore’s foreign minister called for an immediate ceasefire to help relief efforts.
- In the Thai capital Bangkok, rescuers pulled out another body from the rubble of an under-construction skyscraper that collapsed in the quake, bringing the death toll from the building collapse to 12, with a total of 19 dead across Thailand and 75 still missing at the building site.
- Realistic chances of survival diminish after 72 hours, she said, adding: “We have to speed up. We’re not going to stop even after 72 hours.”
- In Myanmar, state media said the death toll had reached 2,065 with more than 3,900 injured and over 270 missing and that the military government had declared a week-long mourning period from Monday.
- Reuters could not immediately confirm the new death tolls. Media access has been restricted in the country since the junta took power. Junta chief General Min Aung Hlaing warned at the weekend that the number of fatalities could rise.
- Critical infrastructure – including bridges, highways, airports and railways – across the country of 55 million lie damaged, slowing humanitarian efforts while the conflict that has battered the economy, displaced over 3.5 million people and debilitated the health system, rages on.
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Important Takeaways:
- The largest active volcano in Washington state has been rocked by a series of earthquakes, putting experts on high alert.
- Mount Adams is a 12,000-foot-tall stratovolcano located in south-central Washington, about 55 miles southwest of the city of Yakima.
- This volcano is considered a ‘high threat’ due to its ability to trigger landslides, debris avalanches and mudflow that can travel up to 50 miles per hour down the slope, which would put thousands of people at risk.
- Although this volcano hasn’t erupted for about 1,000 years, ‘it will assuredly erupt again,’ US Geological Survey (USGS) experts say.
- But it’s impossible to say exactly when it will blow, which is why scientists have established monitoring stations around Mount Adams to track its seismic activity.
- But the biggest threat to people living near this volcano isn’t an explosive eruption.
- It’s actually avalanches, landslides and lahars, or muddy flows of rock, ash and ice that ‘surge downstream like rapidly flowing concrete’ and can occur during eruptive or non-eruptive periods, according to the USGS.
- ‘The ice-capped summit conceals large volumes of hydrothermally weakened rock, and future landslides of this weakened rock could generate far-traveled lahars,’ USGS officials wrote.
- In light of the recent earthquakes, scientists have installed three additional monitoring stations around the volcano to keep a closer eye on it.
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Important Takeaways:
- Malibu, California, which was burned by the Franklin Fire in December and the Palisades Fire in January, suffered a 4.1-magnitude earthquake on Sunday — and is apparently facing a series of similar small earthquakes in the future.
- The Los Angeles Times reported:
- Sunday’s magnitude 4.1 earthquake near Malibu is part of a larger seismic pattern being seen in Southern California.
- The region has been experiencing a number of moderate earthquakes since 2024. In all of 2024, Southern California experienced 15 seismic sequences with at least one magnitude-4 or higher earthquake, according to a count by seismologist Lucy Jones, a Caltech research associate. That’s the highest annual total in the last 65 years, surpassing the 13 seen in 1988.
- The Malibu area has seen three quakes larger than magnitude 4 in the last 13 months.
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Important Takeaways:
- An earthquake struck the northwest part of Washington state near the U.S.-Canada border early Monday morning, officials said. A tsunami wasn’t expected following the earthquake.
- The preliminary magnitude 4.5 earthquake struck about 6 miles east of Orcas, Washington, on Orcas Island, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
- The temblor struck at around 5:02 a.m. PST, according to the agency.
- The U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center said a tsunami wasn’t expected in the wake of the earthquake.
- The earthquake struck about 70 miles northwest of Seattle, according to the warning center.
- Orcas Island is part of the archipelago known as the San Juan Islands, which comprises dozens of islands and reefs in the northern part of Puget Sound.
- In the nearby Canadian province of British Columbia, the earthquake was felt around Victoria and Vancouver, according to officials. No damage was immediately reported.
- The temblor was detected just hours after a 3.9 magnitude earthquake struck near North Hollywood, California.
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Important Takeaways:
- A state of emergency has been declared in Santorini after the strongest earthquake was recorded in days of near-constant tremors, which have almost emptied the famous Greek tourist haven of visitors and residents.
- A quake with a magnitude of 5.2 coursed through Santorini on Wednesday evening, the first to exceed 5.0 since the tremors began last week.
- The Greek Civil Protection Ministry on Thursday placed the island under a state of emergency until March 3 to respond to the seismic activity.
- Around 11,000 people are thought to have fled the island, which attracts more than 3.4 million tourists a year and is home to some 20,000 permanent residents.
- No major damage has yet been reported, but Greek authorities are taking precautions ahead of a potentially large-scale earthquake.
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