Japan's Summer of Misery: Heatwave, Flooding, Landslide, Typhoon, and now a 6.7 magnitude Earthquake

[Arkain2K]

This thread is now restored and Computer Fogie's useless posts have been removed. Enjoy the discussion.

Poor Japan just couldn't catch a break!

This past June, 22,000 was hospitalized and 65 died from a sweltering heatwave that was declared a natural disaster.

Then comes July, 200+ people died and 5.9 millions had to evacuate their homes because of major landslides and flooding caused by record rain falls.

And now this double-whammy of typhoon and earthquake, back-to-back in the same week!

Here's to hoping they will make it through the year without anymore deadly disasters.

​

Powerful typhoon leaves at least 11 dead in Japan, damages major airport
Hundreds injured as storm knocks out power to more than 400,000 households
The Associated Press · Sep 04, 2018

​

One of Japan's busiest airports remained closed indefinitely after the strongest typhoon to hit Japan in at least 25 years flooded a runway and other facilities while damaging other infrastructure and causing at least 11 deaths as it swept across part of Japan's main island.

Japan has long had a reputation for transportation that runs like clockwork. But even that couldn't hold up to the fury of Typhoon Jebi, whose 160 km/h winds destroyed buildings, cut off power to more than 400,000 households and left 11 people dead and 470 injured.

Kansai International Airport officials said Wednesday they weren't sure when the airport will reopen. Although a damaged runway had been mostly cleared, other equipment to ensure safe flying wasn't operating.

The airport is built on two artificial islands in Osaka Bay, and the high seas flooded one of the runways, cargo storage and other facilities, said the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. One passenger was slightly injured by shards from a window shattered by the storm.

The closure typhoon is raising worries about the impact on tourist traffic, mostly from China and Southeast Asia, as well as on exporting computer chips and other goods. About 3,000 passengers stranded at the airport overnight were given blankets and biscuits until they gradually left by boats and buses.

Hideko Senoo, a 51-year-old homemaker who was planning a family trip to India, said the terminal was hot and dark after losing power, and she could not even buy drinks at vending machines after food at convenience stores were all sold out. "We could not use vending machines or access to wireless local network to get information, and we didn't even know about this boat service," she told Kyodo News.

Another passenger, Miki Yamada, a 25-year-old office worker planning a trip to Thailand with her friend, said she spent the night at an airport cafeteria, Kyodo said. "It was a rather scary night, as we were so isolated."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/typhoon-japan-jebi-1.4810731

30 dead, 9 missing after 6.7 magnitude earthquake hits Japan
By Haruka Nuga, The Associated Press | September 8, 2018

​

Japanese rescue workers and troops searched Saturday for the missing for a third straight day in a northern hamlet buried by landslides from a powerful earthquake in Japan. Power was restored to most households and international flights resumed to the main airport serving the Hokkaido region.

The Hokkaido government said Saturday that 30 people are dead or presumed dead and nine remain missing. All but three of the victims are in the town of Atsuma, where landslides crushed and buried houses at the foot of steep forested hills that overlook rice fields.

Toyota Motor Corp. announced that it would suspend nearly all its production in Japan on Monday. Toyota makes transmissions and other parts in Hokkaido and also has suppliers on what is the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands.

The magnitude 6.7 earthquake that struck about 3 a.m. on Thursday knocked out power to the entire island of 5.4 million people, swamped parts of a neighborhood in the main city of Sapporo in deep mud and triggered destructive landslides.

Backhoes were removing some of the solidified mud to clear a road in Kiyota ward on the eastern edge of Sapporo. In parts of Kiyota, the earth gave way as it liquefied, tilting homes and leaving manhole covers standing one meter (three feet) in the air. In parking lots, cars were still stuck in mud that reached part way up their wheels.

The return of electricity came as a huge relief for residents. About half of Hokkaido got power back Friday, and all but 20,000 households had power Saturday morning.

“It was a relief that it was back yesterday evening, but it feels it took time,” said 66-year-old Sapporo resident Tatsuo Kimura, adding that the blackout was a reminder “of how important electric power is in our life.”

Tourists from South Korea and China were able to head home from New Chitose Airport, outside of Sapporo. About 1,600 people spent the previous night at the airport, according to Japanese media reports.

Hokkaido has become a popular destination for tourists from other parts of Asia.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4435747/japan-earthquake-hokkaido

 

[Arkain2K]

 

[Teppodama]

The earth shouldn't have done that. It wasn't a nice thing to do.

 

[MadSquabbles500]

The earth shouldn't have done that. It wasn't a nice thing to do.

EArth is different culture, hard to judge.

 

[Teppodama]

EArth is different culture, hard to judge.

Gaia of Peace.

 

[trac209]

I blame climate change,we should tax those who build a house on dirt or rock after all it’s probably their fault the earth is trying to shake them loose......

 

[tramendous]

Earth quakes are nature's way of keeping Earth flat.

 

[Bloody Pulp]

 

[Arkain2K]

As far as earthquakes? I have no knowledge of that being affected by human activity.

Earthquake is probably the only exception here, and it has more to do with Japan's geographical location (See Ring of Fire).

Increasingly-extreme weather patterns on the other hand, that we have a say.

Where we choose to build and expand in the future to minimize physical damages and death tolls caused by natural disaster, that we certainly have a say as well.

 

[Arkain2K]

Definitely something to keep in mind for future projects, as well as the ones we've already built:

Many Major Airports Are Near Sea Level. A Disaster in Japan Shows What Can Go Wrong.
By Hiroko Tabuchi | Sept. 7, 2018

Kansai airport, which serves Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, was inundated this past week when a typhoon hit Japan.​

As a powerful typhoon tore through Japan this week, travelers at Kansai International Airport looked out on a terrifying void: Where they should have seen the runway, they saw only the sea.

They also saw what could be a perilous future for low-lying airports around the world, increasingly vulnerable to the rising sea levels and more extreme storms brought about by climate change. A quarter of the world’s 100 busiest airports are less than 10 meters, or 32 feet, above sea level, according to an analysis of data from Airports Council International and OpenFlights.

Twelve of those airports — including hubs in Shanghai, Rome, San Francisco and New York — are less than 5 meters above sea level.



“We were trapped,” said Takayuki Kobata, a web entrepreneur who had hoped to board a Honolulu-bound plane from Kansai, a vast airport on an artificial island near Osaka. “We just had to wait for the storm to blow over.”

He spent close to 36 hours trying to find a way off the flooded island, a task further complicated by a ship that ripped from its moorings and crashed into the bridge from the airport to Osaka, severely damaging the roadway.

The threat from rising waters comes as a reckoning for an industry that ranks among the major contributors to climate change. Air travel accounts for about 3 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, but is one of the fastest-growing emissions sources. Given current trends, emissions from international air travel will triple by 2050, the International Civil Aviation Organization has predicted.

As the aviation industry grapples with its carbon footprint, it has also started to feel the effects of global warming. Extreme heat can ground planes because hotter, thinner air makes achieving lift difficult. A changing climate can also increase turbulence.

Low-lying areas along the water have long been seen as ideal sites for building new runways and terminals, because there are fewer obstacles for the planes during takeoff and landing, and less potential for noise complaints. But coasts also provide few natural protections against flooding or high winds.

All told, extreme weather and rising sea levels today pose one of the most urgent threats to many of the world’s busiest airports, which often weren’t designed with global warming in mind.

Hurricane Sandy in 2012 inundated all three airports that serve New York City, crippling travel for days. Typhoon Goni closed runways at Hongqiao International Airport outside Shanghai in 2015, forcing passengers and crew members to teeter on improvised bridges of tables and chairs as they tried to reach dry ground. The worst floods in nearly a century in Kerala, India, killed more than 400 people last month, and the deluge caused Cochin Airport, a regional hub, to close for two weeks.

“We know that there are going to be impacts. And we expect those impacts to become serious,” said Michael Rossell, deputy director-general at Airports Council International, a group representing airports from across the world. “Recognizing the problem is the first step, and recognizing the severity is the second. The third is: What can we do about it?”

Many airports have started to bolster their defenses.

St. Paul Downtown Airport in Minnesota, which has been frequently flooded by the Mississippi, now has a portable flood wall that can be erected if the river starts to overflow. With the help of a $28 million federal grant, La Guardia Airport in New York is adding a flood wall, rainwater pumps and a new drainage system for the airfield, as well as upgrading its emergency electrical substations and generators.

Kansai airport, which serves the bustling cities of Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe and handled almost 28 million travelers last year, faces an additional predicament. A feat of modern engineering, Kansai sits on an island three miles offshore that was built over the course of a decade from two mountains’ worth of gravel and sand. The airport, which opened in 1994, was built in Osaka Bay partly to minimize noise problems but also to avoid the violent protests over land rights that are the legacy of older airports in Japan, like Narita, which serves Tokyo.

Signs of trouble came early. Engineers had expected the island to sink, on average, less than a foot a year over 50 years after the start of construction as the seabed settled under the airport’s weight. But the island sank more than 30 feet in its first seven years and has continued to descend, now losing 43 feet in elevation at the last measurement.

At that rate, at least one of the airport’s two runways will slip under the waves completely by 2058, according to dire predictions made in a 2015 paper by Gholamreza Mesri, a civil engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and J.R. Funk, a geotechnical engineer. And with sea levels rising because of climate change, Professor Mesri added, the airport could be underwater even sooner. “You won’t have an airport, you’ll have a lake,” he said.

Kansai airport was built on an artificial island in part to minimize noise problems.
​

The doomsday forecast from the American researchers has enraged some in the Japanese engineering community. “It’s irresponsible,” said Prof. Yoichi Watabe of the engineering faculty at Hokkaido University, who has researched Kansai airport’s woes. He conceded, though, that the prediction was not entirely implausible.

Even so, Professor Watabe said, the study assumed that Japan, a nation with a sterling reputation for advanced engineering, “will just watch it sink with our thumbs in our mouths.”

“We will not,” he said.

To stay above the waves, Kansai airport is pumping water from the seabed beneath the island to speed up the settlement process. The main terminal rests on giant stilts that can be jacked up to keep the foundation level. The airport also uses giant pumps to drain its airfield after heavy rain, and has added to a series of sea walls on the island’s perimeter.

Engineers had boasted that the walls were tall enough to withstand storms as strong as a major 1961 typhoon that caused the sea to surge nine feet. But Typhoon Jebi, which killed 11 as it tore through west Japan this week, generated a storm surge that reached almost 11 feet, a record for Osaka Bay. Waves crashed over the airport’s sea walls and swamped its pumps, officials said.

To make things worse, an oil tanker unmoored by the powerful typhoon’s 130 mile-per-hour winds struck and damaged the only bridge to the mainland. With nowhere to go, 8,000 people huddled in darkened terminals overnight as waves lapped at the buildings’ walls, before emergency ferries and buses found a way to navigate the mangled bridge and shuttled passengers to safety.

It remains unclear when the battered airport will fully reopen. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday that Kansai would reopen on Friday to domestic flights, using the shorter of its two runways, which escaped the worst of the damage.

At a televised news conference Thursday, Yoshiyuki Yamaya, the president of the airport’s operator, was contrite. “We geared up for a typhoon, but the typhoon was far stronger than we had expected,” he said. “We were too optimistic.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/climate/airport-global-warming-kansai.html

 

[surrealworlds]

It seems like theres a lot of Earthquakes/Tsunamis/Hurricanes/fires/etc.
Is there actually more these days or is it just media coverage perception?
If there are more are they due to anything we can tell like climate change/pollution or are we just fleas being shaken off the planet?

 

[Arkain2K]

It seems like theres a lot of Earthquakes/Tsunamis/Hurricanes/fires/etc.
Is there actually more these days or is it just media coverage perception?
If there are more are they due to anything we can tell like climate change/pollution or are we just fleas being shaken off the planet?

Weather patterns are definitely getting more extreme:

https://weather.com/amp/news/climate/news/2018-08-15-extreme-temperatures-global-warming-study.html

 

[Madmick]

I had an incredibly interesting and terrifying discussion with a fish biologist (formally trained as a Paleo Ecologist) about this a few weeks ago. Essentially, he informed me that dams, the new pumps to replace them for big ag, the untimely releases of water preceding this pump system from dams when the water was too warm that ended up killing million of fingerlings (numerous times), river fishing, and of course, the biggest of all, commercial fishing off the coast...are all minor players.

Global warming is what is killing the salmon. Their dwindling numbers are a sign that there isn't enough food for them when they make it out to the Pacific, and the depreciation of this food chain as it works up to the salmon is being observed most acutely first near its foundation with creatures like the sea urchins who are a critical organism to the health of coral reef systems. The increased CO2 is driving up the Carbonic Acid content of the oceans, and research is now showing that this is killing them off. As they dwindle, so do the fish and other creatures that feed on them which the salmon ultimately feed on, and we tend to care most about the salmon, so that's why we're finally noticing and caring. Cliffs on that research can be found here:
Warm Sea Urchins on Acid (Feb-18, 2018)

BOSTON–Marine biologists break out in a cold sweat when they think about the impact of greenhouse gases on the oceans. It's not just the fact that global warming raises the temperature of the sea, scientists are also worried about acidity. The burning of fossil fuels pumps carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and when it gets absorbed by seawater, it turns into carbonic acid and makes the oceans more acidic (ScienceNOW, 17 February 2007).

Warmer waters are stressful for marine life, making organisms such as coral more vulnerable to disease. A lower ocean pH--i.e., a more acidic environment--makes it harder for marine invertebrates to construct their shells. But there has been little work looking at the combined effects of warmer waters and stronger acidity.

At a symposium here yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (ScienceNOW's publisher), physiologist Gretchen Hofmann of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reported that the combination can be deadly for the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, that she works on. DNA studies are also revealing details about how the urchins battle the stress. "This is cutting-edge," says marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University in Corvallis.

The first step in the research was to see what damage is caused by simply altering acidity alone. Hofmann has several tanks that contain water with varying acidity. Some are filled with normal seawater, whereas others have the stronger acidity that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts will plague ocean waters in 2100. In the more acidic tanks, it became harder for sea urchin larvae to build their skeletons, Hofmann reported. DNA microarrays by postdoc Anne Todgham showed that genes involved in constructing calcium carbonate skeletons were three times more active than normal. "The larva is desperately trying to make its body," Hofmann said.

The effort takes a toll on the larvae. Those in the most acidic water grow "short and stumpy" skeletons, according to unpublished work by graduate student LaTisha Hammond and postdoc Mike O'Donnell. Other students in Hofmann's lab are modeling how those deformities might affect the distance larvae travel before settling down. It's not clear what the impact might be on adults, but Hofmann suspects that they could end up smaller than usual. That could hurt the valuable fishery for urchins, which are harvested for their eggs.

In other experiments, Hoffmann's team added the additional stress of heat to the acidic water. Postdoc Nann Fangue found that larvae survive brief stints in warmer water just fine if they live in normal temperature or high acidity. But subject them to water 9°C warmer, and about 7% of the larvae in higher acidity water die, compared with 2% of those in water with normal acidity. Double the temperature and roughly 29% of larvae in acidic waters keel over, compared with 16% of controls.

Although average ocean temperatures aren't expected to rise that high, they can rise about that much in tide pools, for example. And the results show that even greater mortality can result from the effort to cope with greater acidity. "Gretchen has the story dead on with the urchins," says Andrew Baker of the University of Miami in Florida, who is studying the effects of temperature and acidity on corals. "Clearly the effects are worse together than separate."

Hofmann is now working with Victoria Fabry of California State University, San Marcos, to study the impact of acidity and temperature on another organism, Limacina helicina. This pteropod, roughly the size of a peppercorn, is a key part of the food web in the southern ocean. Hofmann and Fabry did experiments in Antarctica last month, and the frozen samples are being flown back to her lab for DNA analysis.

Know what I find sprawled across the CNN front page the very next day after this conversation? This right here-- one of those coincidences that feels like providence:
Great Barrier Reef headed for ‘massive death’

John "Charlie" Veron -- widely known as "The Godfather of Coral" -- is a renowned reef expert who has personally discovered nearly a quarter of the world's coral species and has spent the past 45 years diving Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

But after a lifetime trying to make sense of the vast ecosystems that lie beneath the ocean's surface, the 73-year-old is now becoming a prophet of their extinction.

"It's the beginning of a planetary catastrophe," he tells CNN. "I was too slow to become vocal about it."

John ‘Charlie’ Veron Rebecca Wright/CNN

In 2016 and 2017, marine heat waves caused by climate change resulted in mass bleaching, which killed about half of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef, along with many others around the world.

"Somewhere between a quarter and a third of all marine species everywhere has some part of their life cycle in coral reefs," he says. "So, you take out coral reefs and a third to a quarter of all marine species gets wiped out. Now that is ecological chaos, it is ecological collapse."

Watch the full documentary: Race to save the reef

One of the natural wonders of the world, the Great Barrier Reef is 2,300km long -- roughly the length of Italy -- and is the only living organism that can be seen from space.

A lot more there, I'm not copying that whole article, since it's a massive feature, but all in here should read it.

Climate change isn't a lie, and it isn't being exaggerated. It is the single greatest threat our species has ever faced, and I find my mind cynically drawn to the Fermi paradox the more I think about it.

 

[HARRISON_3]

Damn nature, you scary.

 

[TheLinguist]

I was there in Osaka and Kyoto this summer, the people out and about seemed normal despite all that was going on, will be back there in December hope Mother Nature is finished for a while

 

[bad seed]

Climate change isn't a lie, and it isn't being exaggerated. It is the single greatest threat our species has ever faced, and I find my mind cynically drawn to the Fermi paradox the more I think about it.

I find it ludicrous that people still don't get it. Major low elevation coastal cities will be engulfed by the sea IN OUR LIFETIME- this is not some hypothetical scenario hundreds of years from now. And this is going to trigger the biggest mass migration of humans in earth's history as vast swaths of once habitable zones become unlivable.

 

[Ron Mexico]

Meh
Still not as bad as the summer of 1945

 

[Takanori Gomez]

It seems like theres a lot of Earthquakes/Tsunamis/Hurricanes/fires/etc.
Is there actually more these days or is it just media coverage perception?
If there are more are they due to anything we can tell like climate change/pollution or are we just fleas being shaken off the planet?

I have been living in Japan for quite some time and I have never seen anything like this,it wasnt the first typhoon either,they were coming one after the other.....

 

[SSgt Dickweed]

Meh
Still not as bad as the summer of 1945

Too soon, brah.

 

[Jesus X]

tokyo also has a threat from radiation.