Our thoughts are with all of our friends and partners in Japan – so far we’ve heard back that everyone is safe. The biggest recorded earthquake hit Japan and thanks to a lot of great engineering and smart building codes millions of lives were likely saved. Above a photo of from The Big Picture. The worst is not over, the tsunami has hit – so there’s flooding and quake damage. The Red Cross has information if you’re looking to contact a family member or you’d like to assist in some way.
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That photo of the road is amazing. How on earth did the quake manage to split the road exactly in half along the curve?
I’m no civil engineer, but that’s most likely due to the lanes being paved separately and not as a whole.
That’s really weird. Like creepy weird.
Alan Taylor, the fellow who originally started The Big Picture at Boston.com, now runs “In Focus” over at The Atlantic, and has a photo spread similar to the one Big Picture ran (and has been updating it throughout the day):
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/03/earthquake-in-japan/100022/
Google has put together an incredible resource center, including an ad-hoc service to help coordinate people who are looking for loved ones, and people who have information about those who are missing:
http://www.google.com/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html
The road split in the middle because that is the weakest point. The paving rollers don’t compress the middle like they do the actual lanes, which means the middle is more porous and likely to break. The road gave way in the middle, and the earth below it simply followed along the same line.
I was thinking about this today, even before I saw this picture. I was on a stretch of road and I noticed the center of the road was cracked, pitted and crumbling, while the rest of the road was fine.
@Rudisimo
Until I come across better analysis, that’s pretty much the only explanation I can come up with. It’s an important engineering lesson in stress risers. The roadway is laid down in two 8ft lanes (standard hot tarmac surfacing machine width) with a seam where the two lanes abut. The tarmac is usually about 8 inches thick. This vertical seam being the weakest part of the road surface, the roadway unzipped along the center with the downhill side suffering semi-liquefaction at depth and earthflow. The upper side had the support from the earth cut that produced it and didn’t move as much.
Kind of like scoring glass for a clean break.
And to get off being a materials geek, this is a call to find reputable causes and donate to help rebuild.
Especially if you live in the US Pacific Northwest, this is a wakeup call. We sit on the Juan de Fuca Plate subduction zone, which can in a worst case scenario, let go from Vancouver Island, BC to Cape Mendocino, CA in an 8.9-9.2 quake.
And if you can get the bathymetric and above wave height maps from NOAA, you can overlay them in Photoshop and check out how sea mounts can bend, magnify and direct the tsunami action. The red plume (above) headed towards the Oregon-California boarder gets started by the surge from Sendai being bent around the Koko Seamount into a pile of water that then kind of gets refracted by the lower edge of the Hess Rise to follow along the Mendocino escarpment and Mendocino ridge. It ended with us getting hit with 8-9 feet of harbor wave which did quite a bit of damage in Brookings, OR and Crescent City, CA. Our harbors had all the docking ripped out and quite a few boats demolished and sunk.
In Tohoku, as in other parts of rural Japan, there are still many one-lane roads. It would not surprise me if the original roadbed was one lane – later widened to two.