(Express) – Japan’s second-largest island is seeing terrifying levels of seismological activity identical to those monitored before the devastating 2011 earthquake struck which claimed 18,000 lives, an expert on tsunamis has warned. A megaquake in the eastern side of Hokkaido island is overdue and could strike at any time, a series of studies have shown. Masanobu Shishikura, an expert on so-called tsunami deposits who heads a group of researchers at the Government-affiliated National Institute of Advanced Industrial Service and Technology, said:
“Eastern Hokkaido is in a situation resembling the Tohoku region before the Great East Japan Earthquake. We should be fully prepared.” The Great East Japan Earthquake is the name Japanese people often use to refer to the earthquake which struck off the Pacific coast of Tohoku in 2011, killing approximately 18,000 people. The tsunami which followed the quake also triggered the failure of the cooling system at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which raised the radiation inside the plants to up to 1,000 times normal levels and the ones outside the plant to up to 8 times normal levels. READ MORE
