In March of 2011, a magnitude nine earthquake occurred off Japan's Tohoku coast, triggering a massive tsunami that devastated much of the region, the impacts of which are still being felt a decade later. In a Review, Shuichi Kodaira and colleagues review a decade of research focused on understanding the powerful earthquake, including what's been learned about the particularly destructive Tohoku-oki earthquake in the ten years since. While large, tsunami-producing earthquakes are not novel to the seismically active Tohoku region of northeast Japan, the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake was the first great quake to be precisely recorded by the densely instrumented seismic, geodetic and tsunami-observation networks that blanket the Japan Trench, which captured the event in stunning detail. According to the data collected, the 2011 quake resulted from a large coseismic fault slip that unexpectedly ruptured into a shallow part of the documented megathrust fault. What's more, the event appears to have led to heightened seismic activity in east Japan, and crustal deformation in the area is still occurring. While the probability of another great earthquake in the shallow part of the Japan Trench occurring in the near future is relatively low, the data suggests that large normal fault earthquakes and resulting tsunamis remain a concerning possibility for the Tohoku region.
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Science