Page 2 - Contour Quake News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

1:15 east coast time, as we first learned about this, we heard it was a 7.9 quake. and as chris warren described, that's huge. that's significant. but then for it to be upgraded to an 8.9, give us a little bit of an idea of how that may transpire and how significant that is. >> the main thing about that is that you have to have a much larger fault to produce it, which means you're moving a much larger piece of the ocean floor, and that it's the earthquakes above 8.6, 8.8 that you start seeing the huge tsunamis. so these are the classic tsunami earthquakes. has an implication for the whole paci...

Land will be farther away from the earthquake because of this. and the bad news is by being underwater, you create the tsunami, and depending on what the relative damages are -- i mean, we see these pictures of fires, and that's been historically a huge problem in japan, the great contour quake of 1923 burnt tokyo essentially to the ground. killed 150,000 people. so being able to get the fires under control is going to be the critical issue for japan in the next few hours. >> is that going to be something that we could continue to see more fires breaking out? how would that be triggered? >> we...

Meters were observed soon after the quake. the agency is warning that tsunami could reach between 6 and 10 meters. tsunamis come in several waves. for those of you who are listening to this program, if you're along the coast, please do stay away, and move to higher ground immediately. you're seeing live coverage of miyagi prefecture in the sendai area. the quake, 8.4, from 7.9. one of the worst earthquakes ever in japanese history. it's a 7 on the japanese seismic scale of 0 to 7. that is the same size earthquake as the one that hit the great honshu area in 1995. fires breaking out as you can ...