My girlfriend was on her way to Japan last night for a business school trip and they had to stop in Anchorage because the earthquake happened when they were flying in that area. A new quake just hit Nagano too. 6.6 magnitude. I've been watching CNN for hours, they said the last time there was an earthquake of this magnitude in this region, Mt. Fuji erupted 35 days later. Apparently aftershocks can go on for months afterwards. Crazy shit.
Radiation levels are now surging at the Nuclear plant. Radiation is at 1000 times normal levels in the plant and beginning to seep outside.
I was up watching the news last night when the news of the quake broke. I sat there continuing to watch, in real time, as the wall of water leveled everything in it's path. Watching people scramble on the roadways not knowing which direction was the safe path to take. It's so terrible it's hard to wrap your head around the devastation Mother Nature has caused this time. With the wipe of her hand thousands of people are dead and there will be millions and millions of dollars (yen) in property damage. The threat of Mt. Fuji blowing it's stack next is very possible. Those poor people, all of them in multiple locations. It's hard to believe it's real. Watching the footage last night was like watching a movie because it just couldn't, there is no way that can be real. But it is. EDIT: To help out the victims of the tsunami text "REDCROSS" to 90999 to donate $10.
Unfortunately there is another effect of the reporting. While you should exercise caution, apparently the Hispanics ran for the hills. An email from Jägerette: Meanwhile the white people were all running down to the harbor to see the action.
So we found out the reason for this. Apparently all the local news and radio in English was saying: "Just be careful" The Mexican radio was saying: "AYE YAY YAE, run for the hills, we are all going to die" Apparently there were even people driving 60 miles inland to get away.
These guys? I think I might be onto something. Hear me out. The earthquake was real, but the tsunami warnings were just a ploy to scare the shit out of Mexicans so we could round them up real easy. Pescado en un barril.
I'm very wary not to get carried away by the illusion that a series of bad events is a sign that things are getting worse. Nor that they are related in some way. Shit happens always, and it always happens not to mean shit. That said, though, the past 12 months or so have been seemingly completely fucked and unusual in terms of frequency and scale. Really, I would normally dismiss such an idea straight up, citing media hype, short-term variability, that it's not that bad from a long view of history position, noting people's tendency to feed coincidences into doomsday narratives. All the stuff most of you have brought up. But shit, I can't help it. The poster mentioned flooding in Brisbane. Should note that the El Nina rains hit Brazil too and fucked their asses with pineapples (Brisbane was pretty tame in comparison). We should compile a list of fucked up disasters in recent times. I'd put Haiti ( Wasn't it 400,000 dead? WTF?) and Chile on there. One possible explanation is that the disasters are seemingly hitting lots of developed countries, where there's lots of cameras and easily aired, transmissible first-hand material in phone pics and videos, Facebook. Has more weight in our minds than that 15,000 Brown People Die Somewhere (Onion headline) Still I'm short of paying any heed to the Mayan 2012 idea. That's just way dumb.
Here's a video of the wave from the Japan earthquake just after it's passed Golden Gate. Kind of easy to discount it for being small, but it did travel halfway around the freaking world. Crazy.
Holy crap. Japan's starting to talk meltdown with it's reactor and have stopped venting air due to high radiation levels.
Great. Now there is no chance of ever constructing any new nuclear reactors....probably anywhere. Except for Iran of course...
The BBC is now reporting there are explosions in the plant. Awesomeness. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12720219" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12720219</a> The video at that link shows a rather substantial explosion.
Can someone who knows about this stuff explain what exactly is going on? What's the worst case scenario? Most likely scenario? Give me some rough probabilities...I like those.
Here's a fresh article. Pretty much the same video: http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/...-huge-earthquake/story-e6freoqf-1226020058265 No one's saying the "C" word yet, obviously, but even a minor disaster in a small, densely packed place like Japan is going to be shitballs. Then, hope North Korea doesn't go apeshit and claim it's a Western plot to poison them..... No expert, but there's two streams of threat here. The first is explosions, predominantly caused by sudden pressure release. It's not going to be a nuclear bomb type explosion, but it vents radioactive material and radiation. This causes it to spread depending on factors like prevailing winds, precipitation and the like. The other threat is the classic meltdown. Fission is damn hot. Basically nuclear reactors are just big steam turbines. The fuel heats water into steam and around you go. The coolant system is designed to not allow it to overheat. The problem once everything is up and going isn't keeping it hot, it's keeping the heat manageable. If you rupture or otherwise lose cooling ability, the fuel can become so hot it melts its way through pretty much everything. As well as heat, it's intensely radioactive. This makes it hard to contain on two levels. Once it goes, the traditional treatment has been to airdrop tons and tons of concrete on it (a la Chernobyl) until you encase it and cool it down. Then you wait a long, long, long time from a big, big, big distance. If I'm wrong, please delete and fix. I don't want to scaremonger.
Quake moves Japan the length of Natty's dick; Earth's axis I get a call from my boy who's about to get married for no apparent reason at lunch yesterday. I thought he needed help with planning and such. You know, cause dudes just don't call other dudes to chat. He indicated that he'd slept in as he was off work, to which I replied "Check the news man, major event in Japan." "Why do you think I called you fag? You were supposed to be on a plane to Atlanta in a couple hours to party but you bailed out to go to fucking Taiwan. I just wanted to make sure your ass is alive." "Oh. Well thank you. That is very thoughtful and I love you." I didn't even put it together until that moment. I was supposed to be in Tokyo for an acclimation day. Yesterday. But it was canceled on Monday. Anyways, I put my money on the end of the world manifesting from homosexuals. Or mega volcanoes.