Question: Will you be going oer to japan to research about the sunami and earthquake?

David Pyle answered on 14 Mar 2011:

Good question Daniel. In fact, I won’t be going, for several reasons:

– there is a large amount of data on the earthquake and tsunami which is already available; for example, the arrival times of the seismic waves as they went round the world; and (alarming) new satellite images of the region. Plenty of people round the world are already studying these data, without the need to visit Japan.
– second, the last thing people need when there has been a disaster is a great influx of scientists – they have a habit of getting in the way of the rescue efforts and perhaps even getting into difficulty. Of course, it will be very important for people to record what has happened across the north-east of Japan, so that we can learn scientific lessons for the future – but quite a lot of this work can and will be done either by local specialists, or by others over the next few months and years.

My own work is actually on volcanoes (but I am also working on the question of whether very large earthquakes affect volcanoes). I am looking into this already for the Japanese events – but I can do most of the research for this from my desktop PC, using satellite and other data available on the internet. This is something that has changed dramatically in the very recent past – even ten years ago, there wouldn’t have been as much information available so quickly as there is now.

If you want to see some of the work that people have already done, there’s a good site which is run by an international team of earthquake scientists called IRIS. This has some great links to animations of the earthquake wave motion (through the earth) and some explanations of how the plates jumped during this event.