Page 11 - Subduction Zone News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Subducting. so this subduction zone here is going under. the part that is japan here that this plays on begins to curl in, it begins to get stresses on it. go ahead and hit play. the stresses here get pushed in, pushed in, pushed in, and all of a sudden, at the very last minute right before the earthquake, and there is the earthquake, it pops. and when it pops, it pops the land pass -- pushes up the water and the water gets pushed out as a tsunami. so the story, and you'll find it on cnn.com, as well, is that after the earthquake, japan is now 8 feet closer to america than it was before the ea...

>> what happened in japan was a subduction zone earthquake which created a magnitude 8.9 event which propagated a lot of energy into the shore there. creating a tsunami that you've seen all sorts of information an videos on and provides a lot of damage onshore. >> is there any way, it's like asking what caused this weather. what causes an earthquake? what is the most basic -- give me a basic primer on that. >> basically what you see happening here is that there's a subduction zone. we've got two plates moving together. one under the pacific ocean, diving underneath japan, sliding down undernea...

See how devastating the effects of mother nature are. it's just extraordinary to watch. you know, it reminds us in many ways of some of the scenes that we saw after hurricane katrina, when new orleans was swamped by water from the hurricane in the gulf. >> hadn't heard that analogy, but i absolutely understand why you make it. when it comes to predicting an earthquake, how accurate can scientists be on either location or magnitude? >> well, we know that there are a number of different faults in a number of different locations and that some of the faults are capable in their extreme of, let's s...

Let's check in with reynolds wolf with more on the science of tsunamis. reynolds? >> let's first talk about how they form. they can form in a variety of ways. they can form from an avalanche of rocks and soil just being a splash into water, they can form near an iceberg where a giant hunk of ice drops into water, too. but in this situation it was caused because of the location. you look at this google map and you'll notice you have this, slightly smaller than the state of california, then you'll notice a bit of a dark area right here. that dark area is part of the pacific plate, with the pacif...

>> well, it's a subduction zone. so it's a place where two tectonic plates are coming together. you actually have like the pacific plate is actually subducting or going beneath the plate that japan is sitting on. these are areas in the earth where you build up a lot of stress because these plates are moving fast and eventually the fault can't take the stress and it breaks. they don't always break. obviously with this size. it's not unprecedented. it would be about the fifth biggest earthquake that we've recorded. but japan knew that -- and has prepared for very large events to come. >> all rig...