Here’s another obscure Japanese Shooegaze band, Lily of the Valley, with “IOK-1” performed live at the Apple store in Shibuya. I think the echoey acoustics of the place actually adds to the song’s charm.
They hail from Sendai, which was the region hardest hit during the earthquake/tsunami. This tune, and some others from them, are available on iTunes.
From Slashdot comes news that the local atmosphere heated up right before the Sendai earthquake, and that such heating can be detected (and presumably photographed) via infrared.
What struck me about this story was that it validates the deeply unlikely premise behind a mediocre 1974 TV movie called The Day the Earth Moved. In it, an aerial photographer takes pictures of desert landscapes using a flawed film that reveals where earthquakes will strike due to a red line running down the middle of the fault zone. Naturally, the pictures reveal that a quake will strike a local town, and the usual race against time ensues.
So congratulations to writers Jack Turley and Max Jack. You were one of those thousands of shotguns firing in the dark that actually hit something.
A few more bits of new on Sendai tsunami/earthquake aftermath:
And speaking of Ofunato City, here is footage of the tsunami coming in there:
Someone has put up a series of videos called “people trying to escape from the tsunami,” some of which I’ve never seen before, and all of which look entirely too close for comfort.
Here’s entirely-too-close footage of the tsunami coming in, including large tugboats and a van trying to escape, right before the cameraman decided he really needed to get to higher ground:
A video from Kamaishi in Iwate:
Tagajo City:
Finally, some much-needed happy news:
(This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.)
Slashdot posted a story linking a highly speculative piece in The Guardian saying that high levels of radiation might be a sign that molten fuel has leaked through the reactor vessel (not the containment vessel, as the Slashdot summary breathlessly announces). I have not seen any confirmation of this speculation, or indeed seen this speculation repeated outside Slashdot and a few other newspapers in the UK, and it is not confirmed by the most recent IAEA report.
Things are plenty bad at Fukushima, but (with the caveat that I am not even remotely a nuclear engineer) I see no solid evidence to suggest that there has been even a partial meltdown, much less that the core has melted through the reactor pressure vessel, much less that the containment vessel has been breached. Indeed this statement from the IAEA report would suggest a better cause for the radioactivity spike recently observed: “The Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan suggests that higher activity in the water discovered in the Unit 2 turbine building is supposed to be caused by the water, which has been in contact with molten fuel rods for a time and directly released into the turbine building via some, as yet unidentified path.”
Japan suffered a real tragedy, with over 11,000 confirmed dead from the earthquake and tsunami, and Western journalists and bloggers seem unnaturally fixated on a serious but limited nuclear accident that hasn’t claimed any lives yet.
(This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.)
Tsunami overwhelming the city of Kesennuma. This one appeared on Fark:
More tsunami:
Tsunami hitting port city, including floating some very big ships past with the debris wake:
Aerial footage of cars attempting to escape the tsunami:
This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.
One more brief update on the aftermath of the Sendai earthquake/tsunami:
Tsunami video from Miyako City in Iwate Prefecture:
This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.
A few random notes on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami:
Top-down view of the tsunami engulfing a fishing port:
Scenes of post-apocalyptic devastation:
At lot of the videos I’ve put up are from Russia Today. Either they’re very good at getting high-quality source videos, or very good at ignoring copyrights…
A few tidbits of news on the Sendai earthquake/tsunami aftermath in Japan:
Another gallery of aftermath photos.
I’m not seeing too many new videos worth putting up. You’ve probably seen a lot of this video before, but here’s one long, continuous aerial take of the tsunami coming in:
More volcano erruption footage:
To end on an encouraging note, here’s a video of two dogs who survived the earthquake and tsunami:
This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.
Some news on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami:
More aftermath pictures from the Sendair earthquake and tsunami.
Tsunami coming in to Iwaki City:
More tsunami wave footage:
Rooftop tsunami footage:
Sendai tsunami footage:
The tsunami in Minamisanriku:
Still more tsunami footage:
The aftermath in Rikuzentakata:
Shinmoedake volcano eruption in SW Japan:
This and all previous posts on the Sendai earthquake and tsunami can be found here.