Tokyo is the real disaster is yet? Geologists are concerned that the metropolis of Tokyo is threatening a further, major earthquake. On a fault near the Japanese capital, has built up tremendous pressure.
The devastating earthquake on 11 March in the northeast of Japan triggered a tsunami of destructive proportions. Entire cities were wiped out. In the Fukushima nuclear power plant the electricity supply was interrupted, the cooling pond turned out reactors exploded and released radioactivity. The Japanese capital, the metropolis of Tokyo, is located only 250 kilometers. Millions of people in and around Tokyo are being threatened by radioactive contamination. The drinking water in the region is scarce and even foods are now contaminated with radioactivity.
Now threatens the metropolis of Tokyo, the next threat scenario. Geologists have found that the crust is on a fault near the Japanese capital under enormous pressure. A severe earthquake has thus become more likely and threatening millions of people.
With the devastating earthquake in northeast Japan has risen according to estimates by geologists, the probability of a major earthquake in the capital Tokyo. The massive shock of 11 March would have changed the earth's surface, thus building pressure on a fault near the Japanese capital, said Roger Musson of the British Geological Institute.
This does not mean that an equally strong earthquake will hit the Japanese capital. The structure of the tectonic plates and faults there is another, what a quake of the same intensity as that on 11 March with a magnitude of 9.0 makes it unlikely, says Musson.
But given the high population density - in Tokyo and living environment 39 million people - could also be a weaker earthquake can be devastating. "Even if it had such a magnitude of 7.5 would be that serious," says seismologist.
Shocks such as those in Tokyo arise where two continental plates collide, drift apart or rub together.
The earthquake of 11 March, on the sea floor raised a ditch of 380 kilometers and 190 kilometers wide, as one of those tectonic plates, nine feet placed under another, said Eric Fielding's Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the U.S. space agency NASA.
This was indeed reduced pressure at the breaking point, but it increased in the adjacent segments - and that could trigger a dangerous aftershocks near Tokyo, also said Brian Atwater from the Geological Institute of the USA.
That would be a common scenario for large earthquakes. For example, three months after the quake, and followed the 2004 tsunami off Indonesia, where 240,000 people died, the strength of an aftershock 8.6 a little further along the fault. On the less populated islands of Nias at the time came to 1,000 people.
"But it's hard to say," says Atwater. "There are good examples that such a pressure increase leads to more earthquakes, but there are also good examples of it." Moreover, this pressure could also elsewhere - and not before Tokyo - discharged. Current would also enter new information, two scientists say in the Geological Institute of the USA. We'll be watching but it is the fault directly under Tokyo.
Japan is in the Pacific "Ring of Fire" with numerous volcanoes, in the shifting of tectonic plates always lead to shock. Yet few geologists believed to 11th March out that Japan would be an earthquake of magnitude 9 or higher to meet, says Andrew Moore of Earlham College in Indiana. It was the strongest quake, which Japan has experienced since records began 130 years ago.
However, there are indications that Japan had been in the past 3,500 years, been hit by such strong earthquakes. Sand deposits suggest that several earthquakes were triggered up to nine foot waves that impacted on the northern island of Hokkaido, the last one in the 17 Century.
Also in Sendai, on 11 March was particularly hard hit, there are similar deposits. There had been modified in the year 869, a tsunami's path blazed two and a half miles inland and killed 1,000 people.