April 16, 2021 last updated 13:2 ET A woman lays flowers at a beach in the northeastern city of Iwaki, in Fukushima prefecture, Japan, on the 10th anniversary of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, March 11, 2021 (Kyodo photo via AP Images).
A Decade on, the Fukushima Disaster’s Painful Reverberations in Japan
The 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Japan a decade ago was a literally world-changing event. One of the most powerful tremors ever recorded, it rearranged the planet’s mass, shortening Earth’s day by 1.8 microseconds and causing it to wobble on its axis by an additional 6.7 inches. It also triggered a record-setting tsunami and knocked the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, in northeastern Japan, offline, resulting in the worst nuclear meltdown the world had seen since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. More than 18,000 people were left dead or unaccounted for.