The 2011 Japan earthquake was so strong that it changed the location of the entire country

The catastrophic Tohoku-oki earthquake that struck Japan in 2011 was so powerful that it caused the entire country to “slid” in some areas by as much as five or six millimetres, according to new research.

This “extraordinary observation,” as described in a new study published today in the journal Science, was likely caused by seismic waves bouncing off the Earth’s core in the wake of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake. This unprecedented event could represent a previously unknown hazard associated with earthquakes, says Sunyoung Park, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago.

Park and her team relied on a large-scale Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) dataset to document precise movement at sites across Japan in the minutes after the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake. Park says they were astonished by what they saw.

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“My co-authors and I were all initially puzzled by this observation,” Park says, referring to the movement in Japan. “Because this was something unusual, we spent a lot of time studying different possibilities.”

After ruling out other possible explanations for what they were seeing, such as a processing error in the GNSS data, the researchers concluded that “ScS waves” — seismic waves that travel through the Earth’s mantle, impact the planet’s iron core and return to the surface — caused Japan to change its stance.

Five or six millimeters — the length of an average adult’s pinky toenail — may not seem like a lot. It is not uncommon for the ground to move much more during earthquakes, causing “displacements”, where you might, for example, see a path separate. But Park says these movements are usually localized in areas close to the epicenter. Until now, researchers have never documented Earth’s motion on this scale, where an entire country was “pushed” by ScS waves, Park says.

“Dynamic excitation of an earthquake,” or “when seismic waves generated by an earthquake ‘nudge’ a fault that is already approaching an earthquake,” is well-documented, says Wendy Bohun, an earthquake geologist. “However, this paper identifies a previously unknown source for this type of event”: ScS waves. “The authors’ observations of slip triggered by this source across a region six to seven times larger than the region that exploded during the main shock are extraordinary.”

In this case, it took about 15 minutes or so for the waves from the earthquake to travel to the Earth’s core and back. The “slippage” appears to have occurred gradually, perhaps over the course of about 100 or 200 seconds, so people in Japan may not have felt it, Park says. But it is unclear whether this will be the case for future slides caused by ScS in Japan or elsewhere.

More research is needed to understand why Japan specifically was on the rocks due to this earthquake, and whether future events like this could be more damaging. The Tohoku-oki earthquake was one of the largest and most destructive earthquakes in the world: the initial shock and subsequent tsunami killed more than 18,000 people and caused an estimated $220 billion in damage (in 2011 dollars), according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Park says the new findings could help people around the world better prepare for potential hidden dangers in the aftermath of earthquakes.

“I think we have to be aware of the fact that there could be this potential event several minutes later [an earthquake’s] “The major shake has passed,” she says.

She adds that this “new type of seismic risk” is one that “we might want to think about.”

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