Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 32
The Daily Mail: The Japanese government has issued an urgent warning over the catastrophic damage which could be caused by an impending megaquake.
Experts now believe there is an 80 per cent chance of a magnitude nine tremor occurring in the Nankai Trough off Japan’s Pacific coast within the next 30 years.
New government estimates show that this disaster would kill 300,000 in the worst-case scenario.
This includes 215,000 deaths caused by tsunami waves exceeding 30 metres (98ft) in some areas. The Nankai Trough is a deep ocean trench formed by the boundary of two tectonic plates, which is hit by a megaquake once every 100 to 200 years.
In the deadliest scenario, the report predicts that 2.35 million buildings would be destroyed by collapses, flooding, and fires. The destruction would cause damage worth £1.44 trillion (214.2 trillion yen) and create 12.3 million evacuees.
That is the equivalent of displacing 10 per cent of the Japanese population within a week of the earthquake. Japan is particularly exposed to deadly earthquakes because it sits on a vast belt of seismic activity known as the Pacific Ring of Fire.
This region is the source of about 81 per cent of the world’s large earthquakes due to the meeting of multiple tectonic plates. This 600-mile (900km) trench has the potential to produce extremely large, and exceptionally deadly tremors known as megaquakes.
Last year, the Japanese government issued its first ever Nankai Trough megaquake advisory after a magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit southwestern Japan. As the risk of a megaquake in the near future increases, the Japanese Cabinet Office has updated its impact estimates for the first time since 2013.
Experts calculated the seismic force of a magnitude nine earthquake in the trench and used this to calculate the flooding and tsunami risk for each part of the country.
