Seabed survey in the earthquake area in Japan

According to AFP, on March 8, scientists deployed a seabed research program off Japan, where a strong earthquake struck the tsunami last year, to observe the disturbance in this area.

Researchers from Germany and Japan used high-tech equipment to survey the seabed area 7,000 meters above the water surface, which was the epicenter of the March earthquake.

Gerold Wefer, the project leader, said: "We want to deploy devices to the bottom of the sea and delineate areas to see major changes caused by earthquakes."

His research team said the data collected from the one-month program, covering the disturbed region stretching for hundreds of kilometers, will help people understand the mechanism of action of major earthquakes and hazards. Muscle formation tsunami.

The program took place when Japan was preparing to celebrate the first year of the disastrous disaster that caused a massive tsunami on March 11 last year. More than 19,000 people died and a long strip of Japanese coast was engulfed in a tsunami that flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and caused a bad radiation leak.

The tsunami in March 2011 caused terrible consequences.

Wefer, director of the German Center for Marine Environmental Change at the University of Bremen, felt very excited before the program began. He said scientists could see "giant fault lines" in rock layers along the seaside off Japan's Honshu island. "Those big rocks were smashed to pieces" by the earthquake, causing liquids and gases to erupt into the ocean.

The group will use a self-propelled diving device 5.5 meters long, looks like a submarine, to draw a seabed map with sonar sound waves.

The mother ship carrying the device will be equipped with audio signal receivers and will map the seabed off Honshu island, along the sea.

New seabed maps will be compared to existing maps to show what changes have taken place when an earthquake hits.

The epicenter of the earthquake is in the Pacific Ocean, 130km from Honshu, where there is a plate of tectonic plates that slid deep down to Japan.

The self-propelled diving device weighs 3.5 tons, equipped with a camera, sonar and lights, as well as cables connected to the ship. It will install some equipment in previously excavated boreholes, in order to activate a system that will accurately measure future earthquakes.

This program also brought up some samples from the sea and scientists hope they will help them find a way to predict the next big earthquake.

Shuichi Kodaira, expert at the Earth Development Research Institute of the Oceanic Science and Technology Agency - Earth Japan said: "The forecast of earthquakes is still extremely difficult due to the limitations of current technology and data, but what we can do now is to understand the re-emergence mechanism of major earthquakes in the Japanese maritime region, through the use of seabed data. in this study and other studies ".

Scientists have also warned Japan seems to be entering a new phase of tectonic layers that are intensifying pressure on each other, which may cause another devastating earthquake.