7.1 magnitude earthquake hits Japan

The 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake killed 63 people and left thousands homeless in California in 1989.

Mentioning it's a duplicate is good, thank you. Next time this happens, a link to the original post would be very helpful.

Please do not add witty, insensitive comments, a pun is IMHO not a good reason to post.

I hope everyone else is safe too.

In Tokyo, it was more like a 3.x, about a minute's worth of low-rumbling.

I was sleeping at that time. I might have been woken up by the shake, but I don't recall it. Well, I'm in Tokyo, here it was "only" a 3 in the Japanese scale.

So what was the magnitude before being corrected?

Like real estate, it is about location, location, location. Think of it as a lever - if properly applied, it can move a world.

There's also the emotional component. The Japanese population has been shaken by the initial quake, the tsunami, aftershocks, and the problems at the nuclear reactor. Adding another significant quake and tsunami (2m, last report), will further rattle already stretched nerves.

Nah, 7.1 is pretty big.

Its especially big news when you consider the events of the last 30 days.

7.1 is big. One of the deadliest earthquakes of all time was a 7.1 (although it was a 100 years ago...) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes#Deadliest_...

Anything over about a 6.5 or so is a pretty big quake. The '89 bay area (Loma Prieta) quake was just a 7.1 (and struck 10s of miles from downtown San Francisco). The recent Haiti earthquake was just a 7.0.

It depends on many factors. I was in a 6.8 earthquake in Seattle in 2001 that did some fairly significant damage to a few buildings in Pioneer Square, but otherwise was just a scare and an inconvenience. At the time I read that we got off "easy" because of the depth of the epicenter. An earthquake of similar magnitude had hit Turkey a few years before that and did a lot more damage.

Likely they did, but probably no more than would have happened anywhere in high-winds.

I know here in the Greater Toronto Area can get hit by blackouts frequently because of tree falls. Having moved here from the UK I don't get the idiotic notion of letting trees grow through your power lines because inevitably a branch or the whole tree will fall and knock out power. I've seen a few trees that are so big that no matter what way they fall, they'll knock out power to both sides of the street.

It's surely caused by the earthquake, but it's hard to tell if it would only be cause by the earthquake. You've got to draw a line between "act of god" and an "act of man" for being stupid enough to let an earthquake, windstorm or snowstorm knock your power out.

There are earthquakes of magnitude 6 or larger quite often, probably every week. And under 6 (like the 5.8) are even more common.

I'd hesitate to say 'just', and there is a rigorous definition of aftershock that this may or may not fit, but it's very close to the big one last month and certainly related to it.

So I'd go with 'yeah, basically' in the absence of a seismologist telling me otherwise.

From the submitted link, as I see it at this moment: "This earthquake can be considered an aftershock of the March 11, 2011 Mw 9.0 Tohoku earthquake. The aftershock sequence of that event has been ongoing since March 11, and has included 58 earthquakes of M 6 or greater up until April 7 2011, two of which were greater than M 7 (M7.7 and M7.9, both on March 11)."

IANAG but IIRC quakes often happen in bunches like this as the earth's crust settles into a semi-stable state.

Tsunamis (and waves in general) don't actually move the water they're traveling through over any significant distance. It's the wave's energy that's moving, not the water itself.

I think this was probably a "normal" earthquake which Japan is built to withstand without many problems.

There's offtopic and then there's offtopic.

I think this one is OK -- and personally if I see another article about how awesome or evil or dickish (or whatever) Facebook/Twitter/Microsoft/Google are, or about how shitty News Corp handled Myspace, or simply showbiz/yellow journalism junk (i.e. pictures of Jobs meeting with Schmidt) I think I'm going to puke.

But there's lots of offtopic articles (i.e. not related to startups or hacking) everyday -- complaining about it just adds more noise and is completely pointless.

An earthquake in Japan is not controversial and might have business implications for some people on HN.

Edit: Removed pro-Israel defense. This is not the place for a political discussion.

>NHK World TV reports that external electrical power supply has been cut in two of the three lines servicing the Ongawa nuclear power plant in the Miyagi prefecture because of the quake.

More tech-related than Gaza.

Edit to be clearer: You must be joking.

user: steevdave

created: 29 days ago.

Please don't introduce these types of commets here. I left reedit over it.