Aftershocks of Aftershocks (What’s an Earthquake Like?)

Since the Great Tohoku Earthquake exactly one month ago, we have gone through an enormous amount of aftershocks. This website has a pretty neat interface for visualization. Unfortunately, the data stops on April 4, thus missing two of the largest aftershocks of magnitude more than 7 of last Thursday and today. Even so, it counts almost 900 individual aftershocks, more than 400 of which had a magnitude of higher than 5. These days, especially tonight, we are having what probably should be called aftershocks of aftershocks.

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On whether the government is lying to us

Conspiracy theories abound these days. One often expressed fear, both abroad and here, is that the government is not telling us the truth.
The fact is that nuclear disasters are hard to hide. We have access to the figures for radiation measurements for all prefectures for the last two days, we have the figures of AIST (The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) in Tsukuba (Ibaraki), and the figures of the measurements of the University of Tokyo for its three campuses (on top of which, we have our own data taken at home). And while a momentary increase in radiation has been observed on Monday (which was still an absolutely harmless figure and mostly proves the sensitivity of our measurement processes), the figures have been falling ever since. Since yesterday morning, we’re essentially measuring only the natural background here in Tokyo.

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The Daily Earthquake

As everyone knows, Japan is one of the countries most prone to earthquakes. Not for nothing are we living on the pacific ring of fire here!
Earthquakes are almost part of everyday life in Japan. While there’s a small earthquake somewhere in Japan every day, I guess on average, we get a little shake about once a week around Tokyo. Even though there are often periods of more than a month without anything, sometimes we also get several a week. Just now we had 4 (minor) earthquakes in 5 consecutive days.

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Earthquake Scare

Apparently, summer is so boring that the international media have nothing better to do than to concentrate on the recent earthquakes in Japan.
Googling for news about “earthquakes Japan” returns results such as “Another strong earthquake hits disaster-struck Japan” (huh? disaster-struck?) or “Severe earthquake strikes Tokyo while the region braces for approaching typhoon“. Seriously, I don’t remember bracing. This typhoon didn’t even touch the coast.

You want to know the truth about last week’s three earthquakes? I plain missed two of them.

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Typhoons, Earthquakes etc.

We’ve been now in Japan for less than a week, but we already had a typhoon and an earthquake. But both did not amount to much. The typhoon was announced on tv and people told us it was approaching (September is the typhoon season). But in the end, there was only a bit of wind, nothing spectacular at all.
The earthquake, obviously, was not announced and came on Sunday morning. For a few seconds, the sofa was shaking and then the door of the balcony started rattling, but it was harmless. We decided that emergency measures (such as opening the door so it could not get blocked and go sit under the table) were not needed in this case.
What we had, too, were torrential rainfalls that surprised us on the way home the other day. The first few days, we were essentially living in a hot cloud. After all the rain, it has cooled down a bit, but the temperature remains above 20 degrees Celsius.

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