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Caleb Cannon

PHYS 1010

Powerful Quake and Tsunami Devastate Northern Japan


This article is about the earthquake that took place 231 miles away from Tokyo, Japan on
March 11, 2011. The force of the earthquake was so powerful it caused a tsunami in northern
Japan. This earthquake had a magnitude of 9. This earthquake is the strongest earthquake
recorded in Japans history. During the earthquake skyscrapers were waving around like trees in
the wind. Just a few minutes after the quaking stopped waves 30 feet high came crashing in. By
the time it was all over thousands had lost their lives. To analyze the events that took place
during or that caused this natural disaster Im going to apply five ideas we discussed in class.
They are Friction, Newtons First Law of Motion, Newtons Second Law of Motion, Newtons
Third Law of Motion, and frequencies and wave cancellation.
Friction is the reason this earthquake was so severe. Earthquakes are caused as a result of
moving tectonic plates. In this case one tectonic plate was sliding diagonally towards and under
another tectonic plate. Because of friction there was so much force against the moving plate that
it was pulling a flap of the top plate down with it as it was sliding underneath. For however long
all this pressure was building up until finally there was so much pressure the flap flipped back up
causing this massive earthquake.
The fault line of these tectonic plates lay approximately 130 kilometers from the cost of
Japan and 15 miles under the surface of the ocean. According to Newtons second law of motion
The acceleration of an object as produced by a net force is directly proportional to the
magnitude of the net force, in the same direction as the net force, and inversely proportional to
the mass of the object. The water at the bottom of the ocean experienced an acceleration when
the tectonic plate flipped up. An external force on the water gave it an acceleration so it starts
rushing towards Japan.
According to Newtons first law of motion Every object in a state of uniform motion
tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. The wave made it
all the way to Japan because there only very small external forces compared to its huge mass and
velocity. Tsunami waves can travel at speeds of 500 miles per hour or more. When it made it on
ground the only way to stop the wave was higher ground.
According to Newtons Third law of motion For every action, there is an equal and
opposite reaction. For example that not to scale, a wave with a mass of trillions of pounds and
has trillions newtons of force hits a house is going to be effected by reaction of the house on the
wave, but the force of the wave on the house is going to pick the house up like nothing. The
wave traveled up to six miles in land. Because of this the most protection you can get from a
tsunami is higher ground where the wave would need to climb and lose a lot of its energy to get
there.
There might be a way to stop tsunamis using wave cancelation. To do this you would
need a huge piece of machinery you could use to manipulate the waves of the ocean. A lot of the
waves created from tsunamis are created because a tectonic plate drops on a fault line. One side
of the line is stationary and the other falls making one side of the ocean higher than the other
creating a wave. If you had multiple manmade fault lines closer to shore using computers to
detect waves coming towards you, could have them drop at the right time to create a different

wave to cancel out the other wave or at least decrease the height and speed of the wave. Most of
the damage from this natural disaster was a result of the tsunami rather than the earthquake.

Works Sited
Fackler, Martin (2011, March 11). Powerful Quake and Tsunami Devastate Northern
Japan. Retrieved April 16, 2016, from

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<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/12/world/asia/12japan.html?
pagewanted=all&_r=0>.

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